I owe my solitude to other people.

Everybody has a purpose.

The fool wonders, the wise man asks.

My freshman and sophomore years in high school, I spent a lot of time trying to get back on the right track. I was arrested multiple times by the time I was 16, so I had a little harder time trying to adjust like a lot of us do in high school.

I have offended God and mankind because my work didn’t reach the quality it should have.

I am never satisfied with myself and that is what keeps me going – I have no post-satisfaction.

When you judge another, you do not define them, you define yourself.

I made a commitment to completely cut out drinking and anything that might hamper me from getting my mind and body together. And the floodgates of goodness have opened upon me – spiritually and financially.

A man who has not passed through the inferno of his passions has never overcome them.

Tell me what you like and I’ll tell you what you are.

There is a need for aloneness, which I don’t think most people realise for an actor. It’s almost having certain kinds of secrets for yourself that you’ll let the whole world in on only for a moment, when you’re acting. But everybody is always tugging at you. They’d all like sort of a chunk of you.

In a controversy the instant we feel anger we have already ceased striving for the truth, and have begun striving for ourselves.

I’m not trying to follow a set of rules and stuff. I’m just living my life.

One of my goals from really early on was that if I was ever fortunate enough to be successful in music, I would want to stay the same person and the same songwriter.

People always say when they meet me that I’m not what they expect. I assume they think I’m this super dark and depressing guy, but I like to channel all of those emotions into my work.

I don’t want to be something that just comes and goes.

I do all the evil I can before I learn to shun it? Is it not enough to know the evil to shun it? If not, we should be sincere enough to admit that we love evil too well to give it up.

I had my moments of being humiliated, and then I had moments of doing something humiliating. I’m glad I lived out both roles.

If you read enough biography and history, you learn how people have dealt successfully or unsuccessfully with similar situations or patterns in the past. It doesn’t give you a template of answers, but it does help you refine the questions you have to ask yourself.

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

If man made himself the first object of study, he would see how incapable he is of going further. How can a part know the whole?

Life is about growing and improving and getting better.

For a man to conquer himself is the first and noblest of all victories.

Violence, even well intentioned, always rebounds upon oneself.

I was so ashamed of who I was.

If there is only one thing in my life that I am proud of, it’s that I’ve never been a kept woman.

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

A man’s manners are a mirror in which he shows his portrait.

I used to pray that God would make me a great athlete, and He never did.

I think that we have opportunities all around us – sometimes we just don’t recognize them.

My mother did not like children.

Sexuality is one of the ways that we become enlightened, actually, because it leads us to self-knowledge.

I’ve learned never to say never.

My view is that at a younger age your optimism is more and you have more imagination etc. You have less bias.

Enemies are so stimulating.

I don’t mind people hating me, because it pushes me.

At 155, I will be the same animal, an even better animal.

I always knew from that moment, from the time I found myself at home in that little segregated library in the South, all the way up until I walked up the steps of the New York City library, I always felt, in any town, if I can get to a library, I’ll be OK. It really helped me as a child, and that never left me.

The good things of prosperity are to be wished; but the good things that belong to adversity are to be admired.

I have to be alone very often. I’d be quite happy if I spent from Saturday night until Monday morning alone in my apartment. That’s how I refuel.

All wrong-doing arises because of mind. If mind is transformed can wrong-doing remain?

Let go of yesterday.

There are as many worlds as there are kinds of days, and as an opal changes its colors and its fire to match the nature of a day, so do I.

If you want to lift yourself up, lift up someone else.

We are taught you must blame your father, your sisters, your brothers, the school, the teachers – but never blame yourself. It’s never your fault. But it’s always your fault, because if you wanted to change you’re the one who has got to change.

I have trouble with letting go. That’s my problem.

You must live for another if you wish to live for yourself.

I have no time to think about other writers. I am too busy with my own problems.

I like to recede away from classifications. You might say that indicates a fundamental lack of commitment. I suppose that’s true to some degree.

Trust not yourself, but your defects to know, make use of every friend and every foe.

I’ve always written. There’s a journal which I kept from about 9 years old. The man who gave it to me lived across the street from the store and kept it when my grandmother’s papers were destroyed. I’d written some essays. I loved poetry, still do. But I really, really loved it then.

Frustration is a sign I am acting independently. The more you try your own way, the tighter the doors will stay closed.

How one life turns out is not dependent on what people do to us or what they don’t do for us.

A great secret of success is to go through life as a man who never gets used up.

Be at war with your vices, at peace with your neighbors, and let every new year find you a better man.

I never do anything that I don’t want to do.

Change will not come if we wait for some other person or some other time. We are the ones we’ve been waiting for. We are the change that we seek.

There’s definitely going to be things that I’m not very good at, things I can improve.

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

I don’t pretend we have all the answers. But the questions are certainly worth thinking about.

I’m not sure if it’s good to have freedom or not. I’m really confused now.