If an idea isn’t exciting, you shouldn’t do it.

People who think too much before they act don’t act too much.

People respond when you tell them there is a great future in front of you, you can leave your past behind.

Every movie I make teaches me something. That’s why I keep making them.

Laziness may appear attractive, but work gives satisfaction.

Originality is nothing but judicious imitation. The most original writers borrowed one from another.

I lived a sloppy life. So I took very small increments in my life. I started making my bed. I started cleaning my room. There were dishes in the sink. It started off with doing small house chores. I saw that the yard needed to be mowed. So instead of being told it needed to be mowed, I would mow it.

Conviction is worthless unless it is converted into conduct.

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.

Human beings must have action; and they will make it if they cannot find it.

The world is full of willing people; some willing to work, the rest willing to let them.

Action may not always bring happiness; but there is no happiness without action.

We all want progress, but if you’re on the wrong road, progress means doing an about-turn and walking back to the right road; in that case, the man who turns back soonest is the most progressive.

We will all fail in life, but nobody has to be a failure. Failing at a thing doesn’t make you a failure. You are only a failure when you quit trying.

It will be found, in fact, that the ingenious are always fanciful, and the truly imaginative never otherwise than analytic.

I spent a lot of years trying to outrun or outsmart vulnerability by making things certain and definite, black and white, good and bad. My inability to lean into the discomfort of vulnerability limited the fullness of those important experiences that are wrought with uncertainty: Love, belonging, trust, joy, and creativity to name a few.

I’m working on my life story. I’m not decided if it’s going to be a musical or a movie with music in it.

If you’re bored with life – you don’t get up every morning with a burning desire to do things – you don’t have enough goals.

For novelists or musicians, if they really want to create something, they need to go downstairs and find a passage to get into the second basement. What I want to do is go down there, but still stay sane.

Everybody is going to have their critics. It’s easy to get discouraged in life.

Freedom is what everyone wants – to be able to act and live with freedom. But the only way to get to a place of freedom is through discipline.

I would rather live my life as if there is a God and die to find out there isn’t, than live as if there isn’t and to die to find out that there is.

Not brute force but only persuasion and faith are the kings of this world.

I saw MotoGP on TV first, before I saw F1 and other types of car racing. It’s what I got more into. It was cool, there was good, exciting racing.

People who are unable to motivate themselves must be content with mediocrity, no matter how impressive their other talents.

Quality is not an act, it is a habit.

Men are moved by two levers only: fear and self interest.

A president has an inescapable responsibility to provide direction: What are we trying to achieve? What are we trying to prevent? Why? To do that, he has to both analyze and reflect.

Success is nothing more than a few simple disciplines, practiced every day.

If a subject excites us, if it stirs our deepest curiosity, or if we have to learn because the stakes are high, we pay much more attention. What we absorb sinks in.

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.

That is how you get to be a writer, incidentally: you feel somehow marginal, somehow slightly off-balance all the time.

Confidence is that feeling by which the mind embarks in great and honorable courses with a sure hope and trust in itself.

Being flooded with information doesn’t mean we have the right information or that we’re in touch with the right people.

Writers are a little below clowns and a little above trained seals.

The one way to get me to work my hardest was to doubt me.

You have to dream before your dreams can come true.

Well I think a lot of times we’re putting things off and I’m going to do it later. I’m going to break this bad habit or I’m going to pursue this dream or I’m going to treat my spouse better.

Mental toughness is a lifestyle. It’s something that you live every single day of your life. When I was growing up, I was a lazy kid. I was a lazy kid, and everybody goes, ‚How did you get to where you’re at today? How did you get to where you’re running 200 miles at one time in 39 hours? Being so disciplined?‘

There is no such thing on earth as an uninteresting subject; the only thing that can exist is an uninterested person.

Corruption is a cancer: a cancer that eats away at a citizen’s faith in democracy, diminishes the instinct for innovation and creativity; already-tight national budgets, crowding out important national investments. It wastes the talent of entire generations. It scares away investments and jobs.

Only if you have been in the deepest valley, can you ever know how magnificent it is to be on the highest mountain.

Be a yardstick of quality. Some people aren’t used to an environment where excellence is expected.

Every strike brings me closer to the next home run.

There are two kinds of teachers: the kind that fill you with so much quail shot that you can’t move, and the kind that just gives you a little prod behind and you jump to the skies.

I think my vice would be outdoing myself.

It is hard to imagine a more stupid or more dangerous way of making decisions than by putting those decisions in the hands of people who pay no price for being wrong.

Waste no more time arguing about what a good man should be. Be one.

I do not live on false promises. I cannot afford to live on bad advice.

What my character is or how many jails I have lounged in, or wards or walls or wassails, how many lonely-heart poetry readings I have dodged, is beside the point. A man’s soul or lack of it will be evident with what he can carve upon a white sheet of paper.

As a general rule, the most successful man in life is the man who has the best information.

God hangs the greatest weights upon the smallest wires.

There’s an ecstatic side to writing. It’s like jazz. It just has a life.

Let’s just be smart this time. I’m looking for smart.

If you can do a half-assed job of anything, you’re a one-eyed man in a kingdom of the blind.

When I prepare, I am not messing around. I find the right places, the right people, and the right environment. Iceland is one of those places.

It is only through labor and painful effort, by grim energy and resolute courage, that we move on to better things.

Our work is never over.

I don’t think I’d ever apologise for music I make, no.

Take calculated risks. That is quite different from being rash.

There is nothing better than getting shot at and missed. It’s really great.