I feel like I just grabbed a big juicy worm with a right sharp hook in the middle of it.

Crankiness is at the essence of all comedy. My wife and I were discussing the different types of cranky. There’s entertaining cranky, annoying cranky, angry cranky.

I no longer feel attracted to the well-made novel. I want to write the story that will zero in and give you intense, but not connected, moments of experience. I guess that’s the way I see life. People remake themselves bit by bit and do things they don’t understand.

What we feel and think and are is to a great extent determined by the state of our ductless glands and viscera.

We do not know what love is. We know the symptoms of it, the pleasure, the pain, the fear, the anxiety and so on. We try to solve the symptoms, which becomes a wandering in darkness. We spend our days and nights in this, and it is soon over in death.

The spirit of envy can destroy; it can never build.

Fishing is much more than fish. It is the great occasion when we may return to the fine simplicity of our forefathers.

Experience never errs; it is only your judgments that err by promising themselves effects such as are not caused by your experiments.

When you think about it, three of our biggest financial decisions in life are made at times of peak emotional excitement: deciding to get married, buying a home, and having kids.

I would love to sign on to do a movie if it was the right role and if it was the right script, because I would be taking time away from music to tell a big grand story, and spend all of my time and pouring all of my emotions into being someone else. So for me to do that, it would have to be a story worth telling.

A brain of feathers, and a heart of lead.

What’s really hard is that you could care a lot for someone and not want to live with him anymore.

Why slap them on the wrist with feather when you can belt them over the head with a sledgehammer.

Almost all of our sorrows spring out of our relations with other people.

The problem isn’t that Johnny can’t read. The problem isn’t even that Johnny can’t think. The problem is that Johnny doesn’t know what thinking is; he confuses it with feeling.

Smiles are the language of love.

There is nothing that makes its way more directly into the soul than beauty.

Because of my wrestling background, nothing a director can throw at me on a set can faze me.

A sad soul can kill quicker than a germ.

Getting in and out of the car with the halo takes a bit of experience. I struggled initially, but after a few trial runs I was fine.

I’m sure I’ve changed my mind about something. Inevitably, when we grow up – as we get more experience and wiser. Well, I’ve changed my mind about some food that I didn’t like when I was young.

Quarrel? Nonsense; we have not quarreled. If one is not to get into a rage sometimes, what is the good of being friends?

It is the flash which appears, the thunderbolt will follow.

Thaw with her gentle persuasion is more powerful than Thor with his hammer. The one melts, the other breaks into pieces.

There must be something solemn, serious, and tender about any attitude which we denominate religious. If glad, it must not grin or snicker; if sad, it must not scream or curse.

Depression begins with disappointment. When disappointment festers in our soul, it leads to discouragement.

Experience teaches only the teachable.

Not to expose your true feelings to an adult seems to be instinctive from the age of seven or eight onwards.

Bitterness is cancer – it eats upon the host. It doesn’t do anything to the object of its displeasure.

One can love a child, perhaps, more deeply than one can love another adult, but it is rash to assume that the child feels any love in return.

It’s with bad sentiments that one makes good novels.

When all the routines and details and the human bores get on our nerves, we just yearn to go away from here to somewhere else. To go fishing is a sound, a valid, and an accepted reason for an escape. It requires no explanation.

You have to understand that people that are hurting are going to criticize.

Growing old is like being increasingly penalized for a crime you haven’t committed.

When one has finished building one’s house, one suddenly realizes that in the process one has learned something that one really needed to know in the worst way – before one began.

I’ve been doing comedy longer than I haven’t been doing comedy, as I was performing for three years before I even got on ‚The Tonight Show.‘ There’s truly nothing like it; it’s intense and exhilarating, even though it looks so casual.

When you have really exhausted an experience you always reverence and love it.

Marriage is like putting your hand into a bag of snakes in the hope of pulling out an eel.

Like getting into a bleeding competition with a blood bank.

Sometimes, I’m very embarrassed.

You know when you’re young and you see a play in high school, and the guys all have gray in their hair and they’re trying to be old men and they have no idea what that’s like? It’s just that stupid the other way around.

Tears come from the heart and not from the brain.

I think women go crazy for a reason. It’s not like it just happens.

‚Mean‘ is a song I wrote about somebody who wrote things that were so mean so many times that it would ruin my day. Then it would ruin the next day. And it would level me so many times, I just felt like I was being hit in the face every time this person would take to their computer.

Love is of all passions the strongest, for it attacks simultaneously the head, the heart and the senses.

Would that I were a dry well, and that the people tossed stones into me, for that would be easier than to be a spring of flowing water that the thirsty pass by, and from which they avoid drinking.

Experience is not what happens to you; it’s what you do with what happens to you.

Love is the wisdom of the fool and the folly of the wise.

Anger is like those ruins which smash themselves on what they fall.

I think the perfection of love is that it’s not perfect.

He who is not just is severe, he who is not wise is sad.

Men who have reached and passed forty-five, have a look as if waiting for the secret of the other world, and as if they were perfectly sure of having found out the secret of this.

All good writing is swimming under water and holding your breath.

Natural abilities are like natural plants, that need pruning by study; and studies themselves do give forth directions too much at large, except they be bounded in by experience.

I’m an emotional person. Sometimes I can’t help it.

Recommend virtue to your children; it alone, not money, can make them happy. I speak from experience.

My experience with power, you can maintain it, or you get it taken from you. You get you some newfound power and go crazy, and it get taken from you quick.

Hatred is self-punishment.

I think that you can love people without it being the great love.

Is it not rather what we expect in men, that they should have numerous strands of experience lying side by side and never compare them with each other?

The weather and my mood have little connection. I have my foggy and my fine days within me; my prosperity or misfortune has little to do with the matter.