I worked with someone who told me they’d never like me. But for some reason, I just felt like I needed her approval. So I started changing myself to please her. It made me stop being social and friendly. I was so unhappy.

None of the records I make are ever a deliberate construction – they’re always an expression of who I am at the time and where I am in my life.

You know, not to sound corny or nuthin‘, but I felt like a fighter comin‘ up, man. I felt like, you know, I’m being attacked for this reason or that reason, and I gotta fight my way through this.

Character is determined more by the lack of certain experiences than by those one has had.

What starts the process, really, are laughs and slights and snubs when you are a kid. If your anger is deep enough and strong enough, you learn that you can change those attitudes by excellence, personal gut performance.

I more fear what is within me than what comes from without.

I don’t think I’m an unlucky person.

Guilt is cancer. Guilt will confine you, torture you, destroy you as an artist. It’s a black wall. It’s a thief.

One of the signs of passing youth is the birth of a sense of fellowship with other human beings as we take our place among them.

I respect myself and insist upon it from everybody. And because I do it, I then respect everybody, too.

I hold a lot of things in. I’m always making sure everybody is okay. I usually don’t rage; I usually don’t curse. So for me, it’s a great thing to be able to scream and say whatever I want.

I think the most important thing is to keep active and to hope that your mind stays active.

You not supposed to feel down over whatever happen to you. I mean, you’re supposed to use whatever happen to you as some type of upper, not a downer.

It is not necessary that you leave the house. Remain at your table and listen. Do not even listen, only wait. Do not even wait, be wholly still and alone. The world will present itself to you for its unmasking, it can do no other, in ecstasy it will writhe at your feet.

Strength and growth come only through continuous effort and struggle.

No work or love will flourish out of guilt, fear, or hollowness of heart, just as no valid plans for the future can be made by those who have no capacity for living now.

Through my films I’m eventually trying to one day tell the truth. I don’t know if I’m ever going to get there, but I’m slowly letting pieces of myself out there and then maybe by the time I’m 85, I’ll look back and say, ‚All right, that about sums it up.‘

Sometimes the hardest thing to do is to trust your team. It’s a lesson I’ve had to relearn quite a few times.

I can’t relate to lazy people. We don’t speak the same language. I don’t understand you. I don’t want to understand you.

I became a people-watcher when I lost all my friends when I was 12.

I gather from motivation around me – from a lot of personalities who have done well in their respective fields.

We will always tend to fulfill our own expectation of ourselves.

Within all of us is a divine capacity to manifest and attract all that we need and desire.

Old friends pass away, new friends appear. It is just like the days. An old day passes, a new day arrives. The important thing is to make it meaningful: a meaningful friend – or a meaningful day.

You can either be a host to God, or a hostage to your ego. It’s your call.

I look at where I’m at today and realize that most of my success is owed to the mentors that was in my life.

You’re not a product of your nature. That is your genetic makeup or your nurture, the things that have happened to you. Of course those things affect you powerfully, but they do not determine you.

At one point I learned transcendental meditation. This was 30-something years ago. It took me back to the way that I naturally was as a child growing up way in the country, rarely seeing people. I was in that state of oneness with creation and it was as if I didn’t exist except as a part of everything.

I can’t do nothing just a little.

My one regret in life is that I am not someone else.

To hold a man down, you have to stay down with him.

The need to be right is the sign of a vulgar mind.

When people are lame, they love to blame.

I have a memory, and I can just eliminate mistakes when they come up because I’ve already made them.

My greatest blessing has been the birth of my son. My next greatest blessing has been my ability to turn people into children of mine.

Fear clogs; faith liberates.

And we are never too old to study the Bible. Each time the lessons are studied comes some new meaning, some new thought which will make us better.

There is a fine balance between honoring the past and losing yourself in it. For example, you can acknowledge and learn from mistakes you made, and then move on and refocus on the now. It is called forgiving yourself.

What’s money? A man is a success if he gets up in the morning and goes to bed at night and in between does what he wants to do.

When you fish for love, bait with your heart, not your brain.

Never find fault with the absent.

Every three months, I’ll say, ‚Honey, I think I should learn how to cook‘.

Complaining is dangerous business. It can damage or even destroy your relationship with God, your relationships with other people, and even with your relationship with yourself.

I think we all change each other’s paths. I don’t know which law idea that is in physics, but I don’t think any of us can live without affecting one another.

The greatest weapon against stress is our ability to choose one thought over another.

We choose our joys and sorrows long before we experience them.

Love is a better teacher than duty.

People grow through experience if they meet life honestly and courageously. This is how character is built.

I don’t know what’s better gettin‘ laid or gettin‘ paid.

If someone is going down the wrong road, he doesn’t need motivation to speed him up. What he needs is education to turn him around.

Sometimes, I think if you get away from what you’re called to do, it’s more of a distraction.

A lot of the problems I had with fame I was bringing on myself. A lot of self-loathing, a lot of woe-is-me. Now I’m learning to see the positive side of things, instead of, like, ‚I can’t go to Kmart. I can’t take my kids to the haunted house.‘

Your greatest asset is your earning ability. Your greatest resource is your time.

Virtue is a state of war, and to live in it we have always to combat with ourselves.

Fear doesn’t exist anywhere except in the mind.

How few there are who have courage enough to own their faults, or resolution enough to mend them.

As a shame researcher, I know that the very best thing to do in the midst of a shame attack is totally counterintuitive: Practice courage and reach out!

Man is most nearly himself when he achieves the seriousness of a child at play.

The snow goose need not bathe to make itself white. Neither need you do anything but be yourself.

It’s none of their business that you have to learn how to write. Let them think you were born that way.

A chief event of life is the day in which we have encountered a mind that startled us.