I have, before now, waited for a pen to perform a macro.

I could imagine at a certain age, when I have no vocal cords left, that I would find a young man who could sing my parts for me. But I don’t see why I would stop.

The best preparation for good work tomorrow is to do good work today.

I am so busy doing nothing… that the idea of doing anything – which as you know, always leads to something – cuts into the nothing and then forces me to have to drop everything.

If you believe in what you are doing, then let nothing hold you up in your work. Much of the best work of the world has been done against seeming impossibilities. The thing is to get the work done.

It’s what counts, isn’t it, on the Sunday, rather than pre-season testing. If you lock up, you do a little mistake, it’s nothing, but if you do it on Sunday, you lose a place or you have to box for a flat spot or something like that. It’s a much bigger problem.

In case you’re wondering whether I lip synch, the answer is no… people think so because I sound so good.

One cannot become a saint when one works sixteen hours a day.

When I stop working the rest of the day is posthumous. I’m only really alive when I’m writing.

A little over 5% of the world’s population produces almost 29% of the world’s goods and services.

That nice, soft pillow and the warm blanket, and it’s all comfortable, and no one wants to leave that comfort – but if you can wake up early in the morning, get a head start on everyone else that’s still sleeping, get productive time doing things that you need to do – that’s a huge piece to moving your life forward.

Learn to say ‚no‘ to the good so you can say ‚yes‘ to the best.

I’ve never managed to keep a journal longer than two weeks.

The only reason for time is so that everything doesn’t happen at once.

Most of the time, songs that I write end up being finished in 30 minutes or less.

Gentleness doesn’t get work done unless you happen to be a hen laying eggs.

There are a whole bunch of roles where people say, ‚Oh, you’re playing yourself.‘ I guess it’s kind of a compliment. Or people say, ‚Oh, man, you just roll out of bed and do that.‘ The work is to make it look effortless. That’s the hard part.

Most people spend more time and energy going around problems than in trying to solve them.

Time abides long enough for those who make use of it.

I don’t have a vast longing for the stage.

It’s tough to go to sleep at night, and I wake up after five hours because I feel like I’m wasting time. I just sit up at night and think about what I can do next.

There is a great discovery still to be made in literature, that of paying literary men by the quantity they do not write.

The pen is mightier than the sword if the sword is very short, and the pen is very sharp.

My dad was into the 1950s doo-wop era. If you look at those groups, or at James Brown, Jackie Wilson and the Temptations in the 1960s, you’ll see you had to be sharp onstage.

I believe you never get tired by doing work. You get tired when you don’t work. When you clean your house, you don’t get tired; it gives you satisfaction.

You cannot be creative with people around you.

To the audience, it’s like I’m changing the subject every five seconds, but to me, my show’s almost like a 90-minute song that I know exactly. I wrote every note, and I know exactly where everything is.

Pleasure and action make the hours seem short.

I’ve always liked being busy. If I have nothing to do for a week, it just makes me mad.

Oh, give us the man who sings at his work.

Time is the least thing we have of.

A broad margin of leisure is as beautiful in a man’s life as in a book. Haste makes waste, no less in life than in housekeeping. Keep the time, observe the hours of the universe, not of the cars.

A lot of times, you could play me just the laughs from my set, and I could tell you, from the laugh, what the joke was. Because they match.

I had no idea of the character. But the moment I was dressed, the clothes and the make-up made me feel the person he was. I began to know him, and by the time I walked onto the stage he was fully born.

In my father’s generation, the product was 80 percent of what you were putting into the world, and your personal life was 20 percent. It now seems that 80 percent of the product I put out is silly, made-up stories and what I’m wearing.

Acting is happy agony.

Move fast and break things. Unless you are breaking stuff, you are not moving fast enough.

I am sure as everyone knows that I am not the happiest if I don’t do a good job in qualifying or the race.

If you try and work out at 4:30 in the afternoon, how many people are going to chip away at that time? Your boss, your job, your work, your family, your other obligations that you might have. At 4:30 in the morning, all those people are asleep, so you can do whatever you want.

Singing into a microphone and learning to play an instrument – learning to do your craft – that’s the most important thing! It’s not about what goes on in a computer!

A chorus is not easy.

Devote each day to the object then in time and every evening will find something done.

When the first big paycheque with ‚Dumb And Dumber‘ hit, I went: ‚Gosh, I wonder if this will affect my performance. Will I do a take and think, was that worth $7 million?‘ But that never happened. If anything, it made me rebel against that thing when people who get rich start playing it safe.

Whoever thinks of going to bed before twelve o’clock is a scoundrel.

If you’re holding out for universal popularity, I’m afraid you will be in this cabin for a very long time.

The world is a stage, but the play is badly cast.

Sometimes in the past when I played something might make me lose focus, or I would go home after a game where I thought I could have played better and I would let it hang over my head for a long time when it shouldn’t.

An ounce of action is worth a ton of theory.

Do the hard jobs first. The easy jobs will take care of themselves.

Time is money.

Either you run the day or the day runs you.

I enjoy singing my songs in front of people. I enjoy being involved in making the artwork for albums and stupid stuff like that.

When I finish something, I want it out that day. Pop music is like the daily paper. Its got to be there then, not six months later.

I do not love to be printed on every occasion, much less to be dunned and teased by foreigners about mathematical things or to be thought by our own people to be trifling away my time about them when I should be about the king’s business.

I’m a writer, not a professional runner. It’s fun and it helps me write. I need powerful concentration.

It’s not fun to get out of bed early in the morning. When the alarm goes off, it doesn’t sing you a song: it hits you in the head with a baseball bat. So how do you respond to that? Do you crawl underneath your covers and hide? Or do you get up, get aggressive, and attack the day?

There’s been a lot of talk of me being a one-man show but that’s simply not the case. We win games when I score 40 points and we’ve won when I score 10.

Yes, and I can sit down on a white piece of paper and work because I don’t believe too much into inspiration, only I’m waiting for inspiration, work and then inspiration may come. It’s a little too easy to say that.

It’s pretty hard to be efficient without being obnoxious.

I don’t know about other people, but I love to work.

No matter what time it is, wake me, even if it’s in the middle of a Cabinet meeting.