I just want to go through Central Park and watch folks passing by. Spend the whole day watching people. I miss that.

All cultures have these feelings about non-functional areas of activity. And the more time people have on their hands, the more they commit it to those areas.

Do I wear a helmet? Ugh. I do when I’m riding through a precarious part of town, meaning Midtown traffic. But when I’m riding on secure protected lanes or on the paths that run along the Hudson or through Central Park – no, I don’t wear the dreaded helmet then.

You can’t imagine parlor ballads drifting out of high-rise multi-towered buildings. That kind of music existed in a more timeless state of life.

My goal in music is to create nostalgic moments.

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

The things hardest to bear are sweetest to remember.

One of my lungs is half gone, and the other half, because I smoked for years, has a lesion. So I can’t swim anymore and had the swimming pool covered over. Now it’s what I call the dance pavilion, and so I and my friends sit out and put music on and watch people dance.

One of the best ways to see tree flowers is to climb one of the tallest trees and to get into close, tingling touch with them, and then look broad.

No one can look back on his schooldays and say with truth that they were altogether unhappy.

There is nothing which has yet been contrived by man, by which so much happiness is produced as by a good tavern.

There’s something about pulling out a real tape from a shelf and looking at it and knowing that ‚Everlong‘ is on it, or ‚Best of You‘ is on it, and it’s really special.

When I’m in my 50s, I kind of think I’ll want to be in a garden.

I still derive immense pleasure from remembering how many hod-carrying brickies were encouraged to put on lurex tights and mince up and down the high street, having been assured by know-it-alls like me that a smidgen of blusher really attracted the birds.

When I was 10 years old, I loved – I loved books, and I used to haunt the secondhand bookshop. And I found a little book I could just afford, and I bought it, and I took it home. And I climbed up my favorite tree, and I read that book from cover to cover. And that was Tarzan of the Apes. I immediately fell in love with Tarzan.

Nothing could make me forget what the Reagan years had actually been like.

As soon as you set foot on a yacht you belong to some man, not to yourself, and you die of boredom.

I used to live on one candy bar a day – it cost a nickel. I always remember the candy bar was called Payday. That was my payday. And that candy bar tasted so good, at night I would take one bite, and it was so beautiful.

I love reading people. I really enjoy watching, observing, and being able to figure out a person, the reason they wore that dress, the reason they smell the way they do.

When I went back to England after a year away, the country seemed stuck, dozing in a fairy tale, stifled by the weight of tradition.

Memory… is the diary that we all carry about with us.

I really miss being able to blend in with people.

For a privileged minority, Western democracy provides the leisure, the facilities, and the training to seek the truth lying hidden behind the veil of distortion and misrepresentation, ideology and class interest, through which the events of current history are presented to us.

A man ought to read just as inclination leads him, for what he reads as a task will do him little good.

Artists are losing the choice to use film. People have a love for it – the grain, how it feels, the texture.

Letters are something from you. It’s a different kind of intention than writing an e-mail.

Time you enjoy wasting, was not wasted.

I love to pop up at the movie theaters. I love to treat the people who are there.

Even when I was a kid, everything I had was the best.

I loved cowboy movies when I was a kid. When I was five years old, I was already wearing a cowboy hat and suit. When I grew up, I knew John Wayne, Clint Eastwood, Kirk Douglas and so on.

A man always remembers his first love with special tenderness, but after that he begins to bunch them.

Old is authentic. Old is genuine. Old is valuable.

I think it speaks of all women having those few special things that make them feel feminine. And so when I was a little girl, I would associate Guerlain with that.

I’m a golfer, and what are the two sports you can do till you drop? Golf and surfing. They’re great for you limber-wise, they’re great for you health-wise, and they put you in sweet locations.

I don’t like Los Angeles. The people are awful and terribly shallow, and everybody wants to be famous but nobody wants to play the game. I’m from New York. I will kill to get what I need.

Cross country skiing is great if you live in a small country.

Gardening is not a rational act.

A sense of the universe, a sense of the all, the nostalgia which seizes us when confronted by nature, beauty, music – these seem to be an expectation and awareness of a Great Presence.

Well, everyone likes movies when they’re a little kid.

I had wanted a tape recorder since I was tiny. I thought it was a magic thing. I never got one until just before I went to art school.

There’s a fine line between fishing and just standing on the shore like an idiot.

If you could take a subway from the suburbs in Boston, where I live, to downtown in 10 minutes, that improves your life over sitting in a traffic jam. People should see that.

It’s still scary every time I go back to the past. Each morning, my heart catches. When I get there, I remember how the light was, where the draft was coming from, what odors were in the air. When I write, I get all the weeping out.

War should be the only study of a prince. He should consider peace only as a breathing-time, which gives him leisure to contrive, and furnishes as ability to execute, military plans.

The good old days, when each idea had an owner, are gone forever.

It is easy to say how we love new friends, and what we think of them, but words can never trace out all the fibers that knit us to the old.

I’ve always liked older ladies, ever since my mother would have B’nai B’rith at our house.

When you go to the mountains, you see them and you admire them. In a sense, they give you a challenge, and you try to express that challenge by climbing them.

Years and years ago, I did a game based on ‚Hitchhiker’s Guide‘ with a company called Infocom, which was a great company. They were doing witty, intelligent, literate games based on text.

The Scoutmaster teaches boys to play the game by doing so himself.

I remember coming to New York in 1974 to do a play here called ‚Equis.‘ And I remember the first morning getting up and walking around the streets, and I thought, ‚I’m home.‘ I felt really at peace here.

To a man of pleasure every moment appears to be lost, which partakes not of the vivacity of amusement.

I never needed much, and I never thought I’d get more than what I had. A trip to Burger King was the biggest thing in the world to me. Heaven.

Going home helps the content.

I had a Super Grover doll growing up. Super Grover was very clumsy, he wasn’t very good-looking. But in his own way he’d always save the day.

When I was on TV in the ’80s, I wasn’t thinking, ‚There’s a 10-year-old kid watching this and in 15 years, he’s gonna be doing stuff that was influenced by me.‘ I was trying to get my five minutes together. So now that those people are comedians and they’re influenced by me – it’s bizarre.

Whenever something went wrong when I was young – if I had a pimple or if my hair broke – my mom would say, ‚Sister mine, I’m going to make you some soup.‘ And I really thought the soup would make my pimple go away or my hair stronger.

Akron, Ohio, is my home. It will always be remembered. Akron, Ohio, is my life.

My childhood was endless – from eight to 18 felt like hundreds of years.

I still close my eyes and go home – I can always draw from that.

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.