If you change and adapt your persona, you are seen as inauthentic; if you stay the angry young man, you fade from attention or seem tiresome.

Only when you drink from the river of silence shall you indeed sing. And when you have reached the mountain top, then you shall begin to climb. And when the earth shall claim your limbs, then shall you truly dance.

There was a while when I was feeling like, ‚Damn, if I’d just been born black, I would not have to go through all this‘.

We write for the same reason that we walk, talk, climb mountains or swim the oceans – because we can. We have some impulse within us that makes us want to explain ourselves to other human beings. That’s why we paint, that’s why we dare to love someone – because we have the impulse to explain who we are.

All thought must, directly or indirectly, by way of certain characters, relate ultimately to intuitions, and therefore, with us, to sensibility, because in no other way can an object be given to us.

Too often the strong, silent man is silent only because he does not know what to say, and is reputed strong only because he has remained silent.

The world around me has changed, and I have learned to adapt but not change. But I’m changing into the woman I am meant to be.

I don’t ever want to come out with something safe and get away with, ‚It sounds good!‘ It’s got to be more than sounding good. The music I like are events.

Little girls are cute and small only to adults. To one another they are not cute. They are life-sized.

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.‘

The world is full of magical things patiently waiting for our wits to grow sharper.

Most poets are young simply because they have not been caught up. Show me an old poet, and I’ll show you, more often than not, either a madman or a master… it’s when you begin to lie to yourself in a poem in order simply to make a poem that you fail. That is why I do not rework poems.

Childhood is the sleep of reason.

A man’s only as old as the woman he feels.

I would be a liar, a hypocrite, or a fool – and I’m not any of those – to say that I don’t write for the reader. I do. But for the reader who hears, who really will work at it, going behind what I seem to say. So I write for myself and that reader who will pay the dues.

We think that the world is a solid, vivid place, full of shape and colour and solid objects like this table and this microphone and so on, but we actually create that in our heads out of the bits of information that hit the back of our eyeballs or hit our eardrums or hit our tongues or whatever.

I’m really trying to dredge up what one might call intellectual and moral material. For example, when do you realize that you are an American? What age does that happen to you? When do you realize what religion your parents practice? When does it all become conscious? I was interested in exploring all of that.

Imperfection clings to a person, and if they wait till they are brushed off entirely, they would spin for ever on their axis, advancing nowhere.

The ache for home lives in all of us, the safe place where we can go as we are and not be questioned.

My mother says I was writing before I was crawling. I wrote in the dirt with a twig.

Everything that we see is a shadow cast by that which we do not see.

The worst part of success is, to me, adapting to it. It’s scary.

In heaven an angel is nobody in particular.

Taste is the only morality. Tell me what you like and I’ll tell you what you are.

I was taught that the human brain was the crowning glory of evolution so far, but I think it’s a very poor scheme for survival.

He not busy being born is busy dying.

An adventure is only an inconvenience rightly considered. An inconvenience is only an adventure wrongly considered.

It is only imperfection that complains of what is imperfect. The more perfect we are the more gentle and quiet we become towards the defects of others.

Noise proves nothing. Often a hen who has merely laid an egg cackles as if she laid an asteroid.

There’s a gap between what I want to do, what I do on camera, and what gets edited. Right? So the goal is to try and close the gaps. What’s the biggest compliment is if I read a review and it’s exactly what I wrote down in my diary before ever filming it. That’s really cool. That’s the biggest signifier of closing the gaps.

Women are the engine driving the growth in California’s economy. Women make California’s economy unique.

I get to hear the really good or the really bad things in the press, but I don’t read it. I can afford to say that because public opinion does not drive U2’s audience.

Because we’re actors we can pretend and fake it, but I’d rather the intimate investment was authentic.

Chinese people themselves, they really want change.

All things are only transitory.

When we enter into a personal relationship with Jesus Christ, something wonderful happens: God begins to change our desires, and we want to be more like Him.

The outside perception and inside perception of Microsoft are so different. The view of Microsoft inside Microsoft is always kind of an underdog thing.

He had but one eye, and the popular prejudice runs in favor of two.

Know, first, who you are, and then adorn yourself accordingly.

The year 2100 will see eugenics universally established. In past ages, the law governing the survival of the fittest roughly weeded out the less desirable strains. Then man’s new sense of pity began to interfere with the ruthless workings of nature. As a result, we continue to keep alive and to breed the unfit.

The Green Revolution focused on the big three – maize, rice and wheat – and the Green Revolution did not adapt the big three to African conditions, other than South Africa, as much as they should have.

You don’t have the same mentality as you did five years ago – even one year. People are always changing, and I believe that everyone deserves the space to change and for people to recognize their change.

There are as many pillows of illusion as flakes in a snow-storm. We wake from one dream into another dream.

Success is due to our stretching to the challenges of life. Failure comes when we shrink from them.

There is a soak-the-rich attitude in the air, a feeling that if you have a lot of money you must have got it by some ghastly means. I can quite happily say there was never any family money. All the money we got was mine, just from writing books.

There’s no reality except the one contained within us. That’s why so many people live an unreal life. They take images outside them for reality and never allow the world within them to assert itself.

I think who you are in school really sticks with you. I don’t ever feel like the cool kid at the party, ever. It’s like, ‚Smile and be nice to everybody, because you were not invited to be here.‘

Paris by night is a nightmare now. It is not a cliche anymore.

Talking much about oneself can also be a means to conceal oneself.

A policy is a temporary creed liable to be changed, but while it holds good it has got to be pursued with apostolic zeal.

I’ve never written a song in my life. It’s all a big hoax.

Those people in New York are not gonna change me none.

It’s a curse. I ask God to take this away from me all the time. I do not like being an artist.

Vanity is but the surface.

If the whole universe has no meaning, we should never have found out that it has no meaning: just as, if there were no light in the universe and therefore no creatures with eyes, we should never know it was dark. Dark would be without meaning.

Ah! yes, I know: those who see me rarely trust my word: I must look too intelligent to keep it.

Character isn’t something you were born with and can’t change, like your fingerprints. It’s something you weren’t born with and must take responsibility for forming.

What is earnest is not always true; on the contrary, error is often more earnest than truth.

Until 1914 I loved to travel; I often went to Italy and once spent a few months in India. Since then I have almost entirely abandoned travelling, and I have not been outside of Switzerland for over ten years.

Music helps me tell my story. That’s where I can really be heard. But there’s so much focus on the things that aren’t music.

I’ve always had a problem with the average macho man – they’ve always been a threat to me.