I feel like you get more bees with honey. But that doesn’t mean I don’t get frustrated in my life. My way of dealing with frustration is to shut down and to think and speak logically.

No one’s policing their own minds more than an author. You spend a lot of time in your own head analysing what you think about things, and a philosophy comes.

There is such a thing as old emotional pain living inside you. It is an accumulation of painful life experience that was not fully faced and accepted in the moment it arose. It leaves behind an energy form of emotional pain.

We are just an advanced breed of monkeys on a minor planet of a very average star. But we can understand the Universe. That makes us something very special.

You know, my family and friends have never been yes-men: ‚Yes, you’re doing the right thing, you’re always right.‘ No, they tell me when I’m wrong, and that’s why I’ve been able to stay who I am and stay humble.

Either you think, or else others have to think for you and take power from you, pervert and discipline your natural tastes, civilize and sterilize you.

What is needed, rather than running away or controlling or suppressing or any other resistance, is understanding fear; that means, watch it, learn about it, come directly into contact with it. We are to learn about fear, not how to escape from it.

If you do not tell the truth about yourself you cannot tell it about other people.

Who had deceived thee so often as thyself?

Millions of people live their entire lives without finding themselves. But it is something I must do.

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

Humility is to make a right estimate of one’s self.

You cannot see the changes that you’re dreaming about, because they’re internal.

I’m aware that, whatever the circumstances, there will always be speculation about me.

Being a full human being is difficult, frightening, and problematical.

I have seen many storms in my life. Most storms have caught me by surprise, so I had to learn very quickly to look further and understand that I am not capable of controlling the weather, to exercise the art of patience and to respect the fury of nature.

These things bring you to reality as to how fragile you are; at the same moment you are doing something that nobody else is able to do. The same moment that you are seen as the best, the fastest and somebody that cannot be touched, you are enormously fragile.

Success is always dangerous, and we need to be alert and avoid becoming the victims of our own success. Will we influence the world for Christ, or will the world influence us?

It is a great piece of folly to attempt to make anything out of my early life.

Everyone has at least one story, and each of us is funny if we admit it. You have to admit you’re the funniest person you’ve ever heard of.

I have never felt that the one thing that I am ‚known for‘ is what I am.

I discovered me in the library. I went to find me in the library.

It’s human nature to blame someone else for your shortcomings or upsets.

Everything you need you already have. You are complete right now, you are a whole, total person, not an apprentice person on the way to someplace else. Your completeness must be understood by you and experienced in your thoughts as your own personal reality.

I don’t need to be vindicated, and I don’t want attention.

For an author, the nice characters aren’t much fun. What you want are the screwed up characters. You know, the characters that are constantly wondering if what they are doing is the right thing, characters that are not only screwed up but are self-tapping screws. They’re doing it for themselves.

Teach me to feel another’s woe, to hide the fault I see, that mercy I to others show, that mercy show to me.

There is a road from the eye to heart that does not go through the intellect.

We do not know what we want and yet we are responsible for what we are – that is the fact.

It’s not about changing people; it’s sometimes about changing a situation. How can we build an even better situation for them?

The purest and most thoughtful minds are those which love colour the most.

If a person doesn’t change, there’s something really wrong with him.

Well, I don’t think there’s any need for people to focus on my career.

People like to build their own story about my life. I don’t know if it makes them feel better, or if it makes it okay for them to not like me, but the last thing I grew up as was rich.

I’m not in this world to live up to your expectations and you’re not in this world to live up to mine.

I’m not confused. I’m just well mixed.

Self-talk, for me, has been the biggest thing in my life. A lot of us have a dialogue that is crap. It’s a crappy dialogue. We live in a world right now that is very external. Everything is very on the surface. Superficial. Everything. And what we’re telling ourselves is what we see on TV.

I don’t think I get angry.

Narrow your life down to this moment. Your life situation may be full of problems – most life situations are – but find out if you have a problem at this moment. Do you have a problem now?

If you only believe that you’re an artist when you have a big advance in your pocket and a single coming out, I would say that’s quite soulless. You have to have a sense of your own greatness and your own ability from a very deep place inside you. I am the one with the litmus test in my hands of what people need to hear next.

To be conscious that you are ignorant of the facts is a great step to knowledge.

When you are young you tend to do so many things that are not needed. When you get experience, you know what exactly what works for you and you tend to do things that you want.

I just really believe people have to get hungry. I think maybe what we need to do, instead of trying to stuff our beliefs down people’s throats, is just pray for them to really be hungry and to see their neediness.

But blind to former as to future fate, what mortal knows his pre-existent state?

Many people know so little about what is beyond their short range of experience. They look within themselves – and find nothing! Therefore they conclude that there is nothing outside themselves either.

I don’t think a lot of people know personally who I am.

It is the superfluous things for which men sweat, – superfluous things that wear our togas theadbare, that force us to grow old in camp, that dash us upon foreign shores.

The image is one thing and the human being is another. It’s very hard to live up to an image, put it that way.

Control and surrender have to be kept in balance. That’s what surfers do – take control of the situation, then be carried, then take control. In the last few thousand years, we’ve become incredibly adept technically. We’ve treasured the controlling part of ourselves and neglected the surrendering part.

Memories are thoughts that arise. They’re not realities. Only when you believe that they are real, then they have the power over you. But when you realize it’s just another thought arising about the past, then you can have a spacious relationship with that thought. The thought no longer has you in its grip.

I’m not talent. Not considered ‚talent‘ by Lifetime. I’d like to say I’m their savior, but that would be cocky.

Analysis is like a lobotomy. Who wants to have all their edges shaved off?

There is a difference between happiness and wisdom: he that thinks himself the happiest man is really so; but he that thinks himself the wisest is generally the greatest fool.

No man likes to have his intelligence or good faith questioned, especially if he has doubts about it himself.

If you desire to be good, begin by believing that you are wicked.

There are a lot of people who don’t know me and what I am all about.

You can hold yourself back from the sufferings of the world, that is something you are free to do and it accords with your nature, but perhaps this very holding back is the one suffering you could avoid.

I had a lot of trouble with engineers, because their whole background is learning from a functional point of view, and then learning how to perform that function.

And obviously, from our own personal point of view, the principal challenge is a personal challenge.

I have the habit of attention to such excess, that my senses get no rest – but suffer from a constant strain.

We cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we created them.