It is not enough to be busy. So are the ants. The question is: What are we busy about?

We record when I have a hole in the schedule. Sometimes night, sometimes afternoon, sometimes morning – we fit it in when we can. I prep for episodes all the time.

Someone once asked me, ‚How long does it take to do your hair.‘ I said, ‚I don’t know, I’m never there.‘

If my doctor told me I had only six minutes to live, I wouldn’t brood. I’d type a little faster.

Reserve your right to think, for even to think wrongly is better than not to think at all.

No, there is literally nothing on the business side that I wouldn’t sacrifice in a heartbeat to have an extra couple of hours‘ writing. Nothing.

People intoxicate themselves with work so they won’t see how they really are.

We want to do a lot of stuff; we’re not in great shape. We didn’t get a good night’s sleep. We’re a little depressed. Coffee solves all these problems in one delightful little cup.

All through my writing life, I’ve had this impulse to write autobiographical works.

If you spend your life competing with business men, what do you have? A bank account and ulcers!

Would that I were a dry well, and that the people tossed stones into me, for that would be easier than to be a spring of flowing water that the thirsty pass by, and from which they avoid drinking.

The future is purchased by the present.

I want to work; then, as my kids get older, I want to have adventures. I want to visit all their countries: learn and live inside all their cultures.

I don’t have time to be lonely. And I get fearful of relationships because I feel guilty about wanting someone to be completely faithful and loyal, when I can’t even give them 10 percent of the attention that they need. It’s just the reality of my time, my life, my schedule.

Rather than love, than money, than fame, give me truth.

A career is wonderful, but you can’t curl up with it on a cold night.

To solve any problem, here are three questions to ask yourself: First, what could I do? Second, what could I read? And third, who could I ask?

I’m sure like everyone else I’m not always the happiest if I don’t do a good job in quali or the race or whatever, so I think beating myself up sometimes makes me work harder.

People love chopping wood. In this activity one immediately sees results.

No one has ever learned fully to know themselves.

I’m sorry my existence is not very noble or sublime.

To buy books would be a good thing if we also could buy the time to read them.

Once someone has spent enough time cultivating bad habits and biding their time, they are much diminished. Much of what they could have been has dissipated.

When people get taken over by the ego to such an extent, there is nothing else in their mind except the ego. They can no longer feel or sense their humanity – what they share with other human beings, or even with other life forms on the planet. They are so identified with concepts in their minds that other human beings become concepts as well.

It is not fair to ask of others what you are not willing to do yourself.

My biggest error? Something that is to happen yet.

It’s hard to be clear about who you are when you are carrying around a bunch of baggage from the past. I’ve learned to let go and move more quickly into the next place.

My heroes don’t have anything special. They have something to tell other people but they don’t know how, so they talk to themselves.

Read the best books first, or you may not have a chance to read them at all.

I usually get up at 3 A.M. I don’t require a lot of sleep, and if I get tired, I’ll take a powernap during the day.

You know, it’s not the world that was my oppressor, because what the world does to you, if the world does it to you long enough and effectively enough, you begin to do to yourself.

I don’t think I’m tangible to myself.

I’ve always liked being busy. If I have nothing to do for a week, it just makes me mad.

I was so ashamed of who I was.

Be pleasant until ten o’clock in the morning and the rest of the day will take care of itself.

When one has a great deal to put into it a day has a hundred pockets.

The unexamined life is not worth living.

I’ve always believed in God. I also think that’s the sort of thing that either comes as part of the equipment, the capacity to believe, or at some point in your life, when you’re in a position where you actually need help from a power greater than yourself, you simply make an agreement.

I get very little sleep when the court is sitting.

Nothing can be by itself alone, no one can be by himself or herself alone, everyone has to inter-be with every one else. That is why, when you look outside, around you, you can see yourself.

I’m a super-duper over-analyzer. You mix that with self-doubt and pressure, and that’s never healthy.

I undertake the same project as Montaigne, but with an aim contrary to his own: for he wrote his Essays only for others, and I write my reveries only for myself.

We must use time creatively.

What good is it being Marilyn Monroe? Why can’t I just be an ordinary woman?

If we are to go forward, we must go back and rediscover those precious values – that all reality hinges on moral foundations and that all reality has spiritual control.

I love us so incredibly, insanely deeply; it’s almost unbearable to see what we do to ourselves.

Don’t ever forget two things I’m going to tell you. One, don’t believe everything that’s written about you. Two, don’t pick up too many checks.

Thou wilt find rest from vain fancies if thou doest every act in life as though it were thy last.

It is no good getting furious if you get stuck. What I do is keep thinking about the problem but work on something else. Sometimes it is years before I see the way forward. In the case of information loss and black holes, it was 29 years.

Whoever thinks of going to bed before twelve o’clock is a scoundrel.

I don’t do meetings.

When I was growing up, there was nobody in my family – not even my mother – who I could look to and be like, ‚I know you’ve never said anything homophobic.‘ So, you know, you worry about people in the business who you’ve heard talk that way. Some of my heroes coming up talk recklessly like that.

We thought that we had the answers, it was the questions we had wrong.

Men must know their limitations.

I would rather be able to appreciate things I can not have than to have things I am not able to appreciate.

You may delay, but time will not.

I’m not a god – I do bad things.

People who work for me know that family comes first. And I’m fortunate to have a family that is very supportive of the work I do, so I don’t have to live two separate lives.

I never come back home with the same moral character I went out with; something or other becomes unsettled where I had achieved internal peace; some one or other of the things I had put to flight reappears on the scene.

I’ve learned a lot since I was a new mother. My approach to struggle and shame now is to talk to yourself like you’d talk to someone you love and reach out to tell your story.

I never thought I would be such a family-oriented guy; I didn’t think that was part of my makeup. But somebody said that as you get older, you become the person you always should have been, and I feel that’s happening to me.