I loved what I did. I could’ve been secretary of state for ever.

No passion so effectually robs the mind of all its powers of acting and reasoning as fear.

I started in action, and then I went to comedy school.

The law is reason, free from passion.

I have no ambition to govern men; it is a painful and thankless office.

The album requires a certain focus of mine that I can’t really explain – let’s just say it’s all I can really do while I’m doing it.

Uncontrolled, the hunger and thirst after God may become an obstacle, cutting off the soul from what it desires. If a man would travel far along the mystic road, he must learn to desire God intensely but in stillness, passively and yet with all his heart and mind and strength.

Films and television and even comic books are churning out vast quantities of fictional narratives, and the public continues to swallow them up with great passion. That is because human beings need stories.

You just wait. I’m going to be the biggest Chinese Star in the world.

I probably hold the distinction of being one movie star who, by all laws of logic, should never have made it. At each stage of my career, I lacked the experience.

Between men and women there is no friendship possible. There is passion, enmity, worship, love, but no friendship.

You might sooner get lightning out of incense smoke than true action or passion out of your modern English religion.

I had this dream, and I really wanted to be a star. And I was almost a monster in the way that I was really fearless with my ambitions.

Nothing extraordinary happens to a cricketer if you time his career – which is very short.

I’m super serious about music. That’s, like, the only thing I’m serious about.

Everybody could be an entrepreneur, but very few will become very rich entrepreneurs.

I love food.

If a poet is anybody, he is somebody to whom things made matter very little – somebody who is obsessed by Making.

You will never fulfill your destiny doing work you despise.

When it comes down to my brand, We the Best, we’re about the people and whoever is passionate and in love the way I’m in love when it comes down to the headphones I’m promoting.

Of course, ‚I Will Always Love You‘ is the biggest song so far in my career. I’m famous for several, but that one has been recorded by more people and made me more money, I think, than all of them. But that song did come from a true and deep place in my heart.

I’ve enjoyed all the parts of my career.

Men are rather reasoning than reasonable animals, for the most part governed by the impulse of passion.

I just was never into performing. It’s just hard work. It’s hard work.

To be clever enough to get all that money, one must be stupid enough to want it.

I thought that I wrote songs and wrote music, and that was sort of what I thought I was best at doing. And because nobody else was ever doing my songs, I felt – you know, I had to go out and do them.

When I was a little girl, I always dreamed of being a star. I didn’t really know what all that meant. I didn’t know.

Everybody wants to be somebody; nobody wants to grow.

I’m not arrogant enough to look back on my career and criticize my choices. It’s really not my place.

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.

I do things I love doing. Sometimes that is maybe going out to have a drink with friends, going out partying or whatever.

For me, it’s about becoming a mogul, owning my own projects, and establishing myself as a funding producer. That’s what’s big to me. The movies and all that stuff are great, but the fact that I’m in a position to do what I want to do, however I want to do it and when I want to do it is bigger.

I tried acting, liked it, and stuck with it. I saw it as the way I would keep that promise to myself of getting back at those who had made my school life a misery.

I didn’t have nothin‘ going for me… school, home… until I found something I loved, which was music, and that changed everything.

Love is only one of many passions.

It’s hard to tell with these Internet startups if they’re really interested in building companies or if they’re just interested in the money. I can tell you, though: If they don’t really want to build a company, they won’t luck into it. That’s because it’s so hard that if you don’t have a passion, you’ll give up.

In art, the hand can never execute anything higher than the heart can imagine.

I think, because I started Virgin when I was a teenager, it has become a part of me, like my family, and I am motivated by ambition for it, almost as if it were a child.

I love to see a young girl go out and grab the world by the lapels.

At the age of 6, a teacher full of ambitions, who taught in the small public school of Biran, convinced my family that I should travel to Santiago de Cuba to accompany my older sister who would enter a highly prestigious convent school. Including me was a skill of that very teacher from the little school in Biran.

Whenever a man has cast a longing eye on offices, a rottenness begins in his conduct.

As a child, when asked what I would be, I usually said I was going to be a huntsman. A fine profession, truly!

I can dance to just about anything.

Great ambition is the passion of a great character. Those endowed with it may perform very good or very bad acts. All depends on the principles which direct them.

I think everyone should experience defeat at least once during their career. You learn a lot from it.

My music will go on forever. Maybe it’s a fool say that, but when me know facts me can say facts. My music will go on forever.

I didn’t know what a stockbroker was when I was eight, but I would just tell everybody that’s what I was going to be.

Becoming a writer is not a ‚career decision‘ like becoming a doctor or a policeman. You don’t choose it so much as get chosen, and once you accept the fact that you’re not fit for anything else, you have to be prepared to walk a long, hard road for the rest of your days.

Stupidity and human incompetence are the great evils, not ambition and glory.

The way I figured it, I was even with baseball and baseball with me. The game had done much for me, and I had done much for it.

I’m a decent cook; I’m a decent chef. None of my friends would ever have hired me at any point in my career. Period.

I love to dance, but my children tell me I shouldn’t. Can’t see why.

I always wanted to operate at the highest altitude, just in terms of hip-hop and the music.

Ambition has become a dirty word, and I believe it is a great evolutionary force for the positive. If people fail or go astray in their ambition I can live with it but not with people lowering their expectations, wasting time, slacking off and glorifying failure and stupidity.

Art is man’s expression of his joy in labor.

Cooking is about passion, so it may look slightly temperamental in a way that it’s too assertive to the naked eye.

The wish to acquire more is admittedly a very natural and common thing; and when men succeed in this they are always praised rather than condemned. But when they lack the ability to do so and yet want to acquire more at all costs, they deserve condemnation for their mistakes.

Playing basketball all my life, I’ve collected a lot of different basketball shoes. It’s pretty much all I wear.

I have to tell you, my seven-year-old granddaughter said to my daughter, her mother, ‚So what’s the big deal about Grandma Maddy having been Secretary of State? Only girls are Secretaries of State.‘ Most of her lifetime, it’s true. But at the time it really was a big deal.

I stay out of politics because if I begin thinking too much about politics, I’ll probably… drop writing children’s books and become a political cartoonist again.

I dropped out of high school and I couldn’t go to college ‚cause I wasn’t smart enough, so I’d resigned myself to loading trucks and playing punk rock on the weekends.