In my later years, I have looked in the mirror each day and found a happy person staring back. Occasionally I wonder why I can be so happy. The answer is that every day of my life I’ve worked only for myself and for the joy that comes from writing and creating. The image in my mirror is not optimistic, but the result of optimal behavior.

I was married a few times, and one of my husbands was jealous of me writing.

Life guided me to being a bodyguard, protecting people, then in the movies, so I’m happy with everything because basically all I ever wanted to do was be a good son and take care of my mother.

The moment I said I’d finished a book, I knew what would happen. There would be a bidding war, and I would end up with someone who’d got the fattest wallet, who had bought it because I’d written Harry Potter. That would have been why.

Love is the most powerful thing in the world, and you know, what love brings is joy.

I think the healthy way to live is to make friends with the beast inside oneself, and that means not the beast but the shadow. The dark side of one’s nature. Have fun with it and you know, is to accept everything about ourselves.

Such is the state of life, that none are happy but by the anticipation of change: the change itself is nothing; when we have made it, the next wish is to change again.

You don’t have to be a renowned artist like Q-Tip to try your hand at poetry. You don’t need any special equipment – that’s the beauty of it.

It makes me sad when I find sisters who aren’t joyful. They might smile, but with just a smile they could be flight attendants!

Confidence, as a teenager? Because I knew what I loved. I loved to read; I loved to listen to music; and I loved cats. Those three things. So, even though I was an only kid, I could be happy because I knew what I loved.

What you have outside you counts less than what you have inside you.

Difficulties are things that show a person what they are.

Rejoicing in our joy, not suffering over our suffering, makes someone a friend.

Every seven years, I sit down and make a whole new plan.

The relationship to one’s fellow man is the relationship of prayer, the relationship to oneself is the relationship of striving; it is from prayer that one draws the strength for one’s striving.

Do not keep saying to yourself, if you can possibly avoid it, ‚But how can it be like that?‘ because you will get ‚down the drain,‘ into a blind alley from which nobody has yet escaped. Nobody knows how it can be like that.

It is not the mountain we conquer but ourselves.

I guess I have always been deeply terrified to really be someone’s wife since I know from life one cannot love another, ever, really.

I don’t care if people think I am an overactor, as long as they enjoy what I do. People who think that would call Van Gogh an overpainter.

I just want to be myself.

Your timeless self does not age and has no fear of the future. Contemplate your physical self and all its possessions, and practice laughing peacefully at it all.

A book must be the ax for the frozen sea within us.

You’re just left with yourself all the time, whatever you do anyway. You’ve got to get down to your own God in your own temple. It’s all down to you, mate.

Who is more to be pitied, a writer bound and gagged by policemen or one living in perfect freedom who has nothing more to say?

I’m not a regrets-type person.

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.

Mind your speech a little lest you should mar your fortunes.

There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written, or badly written.

You cannot create experience. You must undergo it.

There were people who incorporated melody before me, but I would deem myself the first person to successfully rap and sing.

Most people would assume my business success, and the wealth that comes with it, have brought me happiness. But I know I am successful, wealthy, and connected because I am happy.

A man can do only what he can do. But if he does that each day he can sleep at night and do it again the next day.

The reward of one duty is the power to fulfill another.

You have learnt something. That always feels at first as if you had lost something.

People don’t usually compliment your character.

Writers write to influence their readers, their preachers, their auditors, but always, at bottom, to be more themselves.

Thought must be divided against itself before it can come to any knowledge of itself.

I’ve tried everything. I’ve done therapy, I’ve done colonics. I went to a psychic who had me running around town buying pieces of ribbon to fill the colors in my aura. Did the Prozac thing.

Get busy living, or get busy dying.

At Cornell University, my professor of European literature, Vladimir Nabokov, changed the way I read and the way I write. Words could paint pictures, I learned from him. Choosing the right word, and the right word order, he illustrated, could make an enormous difference in conveying an image or an idea.

I find with most of my readers are kind of like me, sort of people who were a little bit naive in life and then learned the hard way that this is what’s going on, the political games and most of my readers write to me telling me that the book helped them open their eyes to what other people are doing to them.

When people do not respect us we are sharply offended; yet in his private heart no man much respects himself.

Bottom line is, I didn’t return to Apple to make a fortune. I’ve been very lucky in my life and already have one. When I was 25, my net worth was $100 million or so. I decided then that I wasn’t going to let it ruin my life. There’s no way you could ever spend it all, and I don’t view wealth as something that validates my intelligence.

In college, I think I probably positioned myself as an aspiring writer, meaning I dressed sort of extravagantly and adopted all the semi-Byronic affectations, as if I were writing, although I wasn’t actually doing any writing.

I’m always attracted to people who interest me. They’ve got to be people who are really true to themselves somehow, and who are always trying to do something that makes their life more interesting, or better, or something for somebody else. They’re interested in people.

My goal was never to be the loudest or the craziest. It was to be the most entertaining.

I don’t like looking back. I’m always constantly looking forward. I’m not the one to sort of sit and cry over spilt milk. I’m too busy looking for the next cow.

There is no austerity equal to a balanced mind, and there is no happiness equal to contentment; there is no disease like covetousness, and no virtue like mercy.

You have to come to your closed doors before you get to your open doors… What if you knew you had to go through 32 closed doors before you got to your open door? Well, then you’d come to closed door number eight and you’d think, ‚Great, I got another one out of the way’… Keep moving forward.

I believe in being an innovator.

It’s certainly not wrong to want to be a better person. God gave us that desire.

We cannot teach people anything; we can only help them discover it within themselves.

The palace is not safe when the cottage is not happy.

I just really believe people have to get hungry. I think maybe what we need to do, instead of trying to stuff our beliefs down people’s throats, is just pray for them to really be hungry and to see their neediness.

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

If I’m not in love, if I’m not with a long-term companion, I cannot be happy.

My style influences my music and everything around me.

Behavior is the mirror in which everyone shows their image.

The curse of me and my nation is that we always think things can be bettered by immediate action of some sort, any sort rather than no sort.

Just because you like my stuff doesn’t mean I owe you anything.

What lies behind us and what lies ahead of us are tiny matters compared to what lives within us.