I have always thought of myself as a Czechoslovak Catholic.

If you change and adapt your persona, you are seen as inauthentic; if you stay the angry young man, you fade from attention or seem tiresome.

My experiences at Princeton have made me far more aware of my ‚blackness‘ than ever before. I have found that at Princeton, no matter how liberal and open-minded some of my white professors and classmates try to be toward me, I sometimes feel like a visitor on campus; as if I really don’t belong.

Funk, I don’t think I have anything to do with funk. I’ve never considered myself funky.

The reason people think it’s important to be white is that they think it’s important not to be black.

I don’t think I ever thought of myself as Superman. But there were people who thought of me that way, and maybe I believed them a little.

It was weird to be married; you kind of lose your identity. You’re suddenly somebody’s wife. And you’re like, ‚Oh, I’m half of a couple now. I’ve lost me.‘

How does a nice Catholic girl end up going to prison for a year? It’s crazy. I’ve made mistakes. I have to pay for those mistakes.

The poetry you read has been written for you, each of you – black, white, Hispanic, man, woman, gay, straight.

You can be a rank insider as well as a rank outsider.

The Catholic and the Communist are alike in assuming that an opponent cannot be both honest and intelligent.

I was raised a Catholic on both sides of the family. I went to a Catholic grade school and thought everybody in the country was Catholic, because that’s all I ever was associated with.

Where would I be without baseball? Who am I without baseball?

The answer is, who you are cannot be defined through thinking or mental labels or definitions, because it’s beyond that. It is the very sense of being, or presence, that is there when you become conscious of the present moment. In essence, you and what we call the present moment are, at the deepest level, one.

Sometimes I wonder if I’m as famous for my wheelchair and disabilities as I am for my discoveries.

I am the Democratic Party’s candidate for president who happens also to be a Catholic. I do not speak for my church on public matters – and the church does not speak for me.

Above all, this country is our own. Nobody has to get up in the morning and worry what his neighbors think of him. Being a Jew is no problem here.

It is now quite lawful for a Catholic woman to avoid pregnancy by a resort to mathematics, though she is still forbidden to resort to physics or chemistry.

There are some teams and logos you see, no matter where you are in the world, and you know exactly who they are and what they mean.

You know, when you don’t go on TV and talk about how many women you sleep with, some people in Hollywood, that are supposedly ‚in the know,‘ start whispering that you’re gay. If I were gay, I wouldn’t be ashamed to admit it, but I’m not.

It’s very unnatural to be someone for so many people. But of course it’s very nice.

We’re so trendy we can’t even escape ourselves.

Why am I a star? It can’t be because of looks.

I had to prove you could be a new kind of black man. I had to show the world.

To avoid being mistaken for a sellout, I chose my friends carefully. The more politically active black students. The foreign students. The Chicanos. The Marxist professors and structural feminists and punk-rock performance poets.

In the egoic state, your sense of self, your identity, is derived from your thinking mind – in other words, what your mind tells you about yourself: the storyline of you, the memories, the expectations, all the thoughts that go through your head continuously and the emotions that reflect those thoughts. All those things make up your sense of self.

I’m Mickey Mouse. They don’t know who’s inside the suit.

Just as the humble, unassuming, assenting ‚O.K.‘ has deposed the more affirmative ‚Yes,‘ so the little cringe and hesitation and approximation of ‚like‘ are a help to young people who are struggling to negotiate the shoals and rapids of ethnic identity, the street, and general correctness.

In twenty years I’ve never had a day when I didn’t have to think about someone else’s needs. And this means the writing has to be fitted around it.

Nationality is the miracle of political independence; race is the principle of physical analogy.

I am not part of the problem. I am a Republican.

We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful what we pretend to be.

In my relationship with God, I’ve learned that if I follow a ‚formula‘ for how I spend my time with Him, then I’m just accomplishing a checklist of things I feel obligated to do to please Him. This makes my spiritual life more about doing what I need to do to fulfill an obligation than something meaningful.

Everywhere I go, the kids call me ‚the book lady.‘ The older I get, the more appreciative I seem to be of the ‚book lady‘ title. It makes me feel more like a legitimate person, not just a singer or an entertainer. But it makes me feel like I’ve done something good with my life and with my success.

We have always found the Irish a bit odd. They refuse to be English.

I always was a Christian… whatsoever a man thinks in his heart is who he is.

One is still what one is going to cease to be and already what one is going to become. One lives one’s death, one dies one’s life.

I am not The Rock. I am Dwayne Johnson.

The ache for home lives in all of us, the safe place where we can go as we are and not be questioned.

There’s Madeleine, and then there’s ‚Madeleine Albright‘. And I sometimes kind of think, who is this person? Once you become ‚Madeleine Albright‘ it doesn’t go away.

There is much to support the view that it is clothes that wear us, and not we, them; we may make them take the mould of arm or breast, but they mould our hearts, our brains, our tongues to their liking.

I don’t know who I would have been if I never watched MotoGP.

When people get taken over by the ego to such an extent, there is nothing else in their mind except the ego. They can no longer feel or sense their humanity – what they share with other human beings, or even with other life forms on the planet. They are so identified with concepts in their minds that other human beings become concepts as well.

We are not what we are, nor do we treat or esteem each other for such, but for what we are capable of being.

By its birth, and for all time, Christianity is pledged to the Cross and dominated by the sign of the Cross. It cannot remain its own self except by identifying itself ever more intensely with the essence of the Cross.

We Jews have a secret weapon in our struggle with the Arabs; we have no place to go.

Woman’s at best a contradiction still.

I’ll be honest: I haven’t ruled politics out.

‚They‘ is… stay away from them, please. There is so many different definitions of ‚they.‘ You might have a personal ‚they.‘ They against you; they want you broken and miserable. They don’t like winners; they don’t like people who’s blessed. So everybody’s got a different ‚they.‘

Your life will be a blessed and balanced experience if you first honor your identity and priority.

The deep, personal material of the latter half of your life is your children. You can write about your parents when they’re gone, but your children are still going to be here, and you’re going to want them to come and visit you in the nursing home.

My mom is very religious – Catholic – and from a young age they brought me to the church.

If I were not Alexander, I would be Diogenes.

Let us not forget who we are. Drug abuse is a repudiation of everything America is.

With my childhood, it’s a wonder I’m not psychotic. I was the little Jewish boy in the non-Jewish neighborhood. It was a little like being the first Negro enrolled in the all-white school. I grew up in libraries and among books, without friends.

I wear the national dress because it is the most natural and the most becoming for an Indian.

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

What a liberation to realize that the ‚voice in my head‘ is not who I am. ‚Who am I, then?‘ The one who sees that.

It’s hard to articulate how I think about myself as a public figure.

Everybody always laughs because I feel so much more comfortable with, like, a giant paper bag on my whole body and paint on my face. Sometimes I try really hard to take it all off. But inevitably what’s underneath is still not a straight edge. And I don’t think it ever will be.

Wanting to be someone else is a waste of the person you are.