I’ve been running a full marathon every year for more than 20 years, and my record is getting worse. Getting older, getting worse. It’s natural.

When we get to wishing a great deal for ourselves, whatever we get soon turns into mere limitation and exclusion.

Catering to bad feelings feeds and empowers them.

When I came into this industry, I was never afraid to be myself.

I used to run a full marathon in three hours and 25 or 26 minutes. Not any more.

Knowledge cultivates your seeds and does not sow in your seeds.

It’s an offseason. These days are valuable for everybody.

I don’t tell people, ‚You’re okay the way that you are.‘ That’s not the right story. The right story is, ‚You’re way less than you could be.‘

Writing is fun – at least mostly. I write for four hours every day. After that I go running. As a rule, 10 kilometers (6.2 miles). That’s easy to manage.

Guarding your heart and protecting your dignity are a little bit more important than clarifying the emotions of someone who’s only texting you back three words. I’ve learned that from trying to figure out people who don’t deserve to be figured out.

It creeps me out sometimes to think of the person I was. I was a terrible person. I was mean to people.

Peace in the world starts with peace in oneself. If everyone lives mindfully, everyone will be more healthy, feel more fulfilled in their daily lives and there will be more peace.

When you are offended at any man’s fault, turn to yourself and study your own failings. Then you will forget your anger.

I claim to be a simple individual liable to err like any other fellow mortal. I own, however, that I have humility enough to confess my errors and to retrace my steps.

I began running on an everyday basis after I became a writer. As being a writer requires sitting at a desk for hours a day, without getting some exercise you’d quickly get out of shape and gain weight, I figured.

The Pirellis you can push for a couple of laps and then you’ve got to start saving. It’s not easy.

It’s very hard to find your own words – and you don’t actually exist until you have your own words.

If you are against yourself, you will never reach your highest potential. And when you criticize yourself, you’re criticizing God.

I’m afraid to fail again.

My public is growing up just as I am. After all, I’m not 19 anymore and if I stick with the sex bit, who will be paying to see me when I’m 50?

It’s very unnatural to be someone for so many people. But of course it’s very nice.

The fame thing is interesting because I never wanted to be famous, and I never dreamt I would be famous.

What humility does for one is it reminds us that there are people before me. I have already been paid for. And what I need to do is prepare myself so that I can pay for someone else who has yet to come but who may be here and needs me.

No man, however strong, can serve ten years as schoolmaster, priest, or Senator, and remain fit for anything else.

I think we have to own the fears that we have of each other, and then, in some practical way, some daily way, figure out how to see people differently than the way we were brought up to.

They would not find me changed from him they knew – only more sure of all I thought was true.

How poor are they that have not patience! What wound did ever heal but by degrees?

I didn’t want to be a fashion designer, and for a good half of my career I didn’t like it. I always wanted to do other things.

Self-interest is the enemy of all true affection.

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.

Once you start doing only what you’ve already proven you can do, you’re on the road to death.

My philosophy is it’s none of my business what people say of me and think of me. I am what I am, and I do what I do. I expect nothing and accept everything. And it makes life so much easier.

I never saw myself as a folk singer.

In those days he was wiser than he is now; he used to frequently take my advice.

To be nobody but yourself in a world which is doing its best, night and day, to make you everybody else – means to fight the hardest battle which any human being can fight; and never stop fighting.

At 50, I began to know who I was. It was like waking up to myself.

The superior man thinks always of virtue; the common man thinks of comfort.

Modesty is a learned affectation. And as soon as life slams the modest person against the wall, that modesty drops.

And above all things, never think that you’re not good enough yourself. A man should never think that. My belief is that in life people will take you at your own reckoning.

One’s real life is so often the life that one does not lead.

It was my delusion and naivety that brought me here.

The roots of the problems we face in the world, in our national life, and in our family and personal lives are spiritual.

Feeling sorry for ourselves is the most useless waste of energy on the planet. It does absolutely no good. We can’t let our circumstances or what others do or don’t do control us. We can decide to be happy regardless.

Forget the past.

As long as I’m learning something, I figure I’m OK – it’s a decent day.

I need to keep working on myself for a while.

The greatest and most important problems of life are all fundamentally insoluble. They can never be solved but only outgrown.

I say, beware of all enterprises that require new clothes, and not rather a new wearer of clothes.

I’ll die a crazy old man!

It is only to the individual that a soul is given.

A great secret of success is to go through life as a man who never gets used up.

Many people, especially young people, would like to be more independent and on their own. But it is very difficult and they suffer from feelings of isolation. I think that is one reason why young readers support my work.

I had nothing growing up, but I always wanted to be ‚sexy,‘ even before I knew what the word was.

These are the soul’s changes. I don’t believe in ageing. I believe in forever altering one’s aspect to the sun. Hence my optimism.

If you are living out of a sense of obligation you are slave.

If I wouldn’t have found Courtney, I probably would have carried on with a bisexual lifestyle.

You can hold yourself back from the sufferings of the world, that is something you are free to do and it accords with your nature, but perhaps this very holding back is the one suffering you could avoid.

I don’t like it when people who are young act like they’re 40. That’s taking too much on. Putting up a shield and trying to act like you’re so mature or whatever – I don’t try to act mature. Some people might say I’m mature for my age, but it’s not something I’m trying to do, you know? I’m just me.

To be yourself in a world that is constantly trying to make you something else is the greatest accomplishment.

I can very well do without God both in my life and in my painting, but I cannot, suffering as I am, do without something which is greater than I am, which is my life, the power to create.

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