I’ve never been a hands-on dad. I’m not ashamed to admit it, but you can’t run a restaurant and be home for tea at 4:30 and bath and change nappies.

I’m gonna go hard no matter what because I gotta feed my family, and I gotta feed myself.

Jobs are a centuries-old concept created during the Industrial Revolution. Despite the reality that we’re now deep in the Information Age, many people are studying for, or working at, or clinging to the Industrial Age idea of a safe, secure job.

There is one kind of robber whom the law does not strike at, and who steals what is most precious to men: time.

It goes without saying that you should never have more children than you have car windows.

When the first big paycheque with ‚Dumb And Dumber‘ hit, I went: ‚Gosh, I wonder if this will affect my performance. Will I do a take and think, was that worth $7 million?‘ But that never happened. If anything, it made me rebel against that thing when people who get rich start playing it safe.

Sometimes I wish I had taken the Bob Dylan route and sang songs where my voice would not go out on me every night, so I could have a career if I wanted.

To build may have to be the slow and laborious task of years. To destroy can be the thoughtless act of a single day.

Like all the best families, we have our share of eccentricities, of impetuous and wayward youngsters and of family disagreements.

My ultimate life dream project is my kids. My family.

You see, at the end of the day, my most important title is still ‚mom-in-chief.‘ My daughters are still the heart of my heart and the center of my world.

Sometimes if you got a problem deep rooted in your life, it takes a little bit of time to overcome it in that area.

I’ve got two daughters. 9 years old and 6 years old. I am going to teach them first of all about values and morals. But if they make a mistake, I don’t want them punished with a baby.

Friends are thieves of time.

My father used to wear the same pants for like a week.

I would as soon leave my son a curse as the almighty dollar.

Life began with waking up and loving my mother’s face.

To love is so startling it leaves little time for anything else.

The death of my father is probably the biggest thing that I ever faced. Daddy and I were best friends.

My family didn’t have a lot of money, so I worked my heart out to get my degrees. But the minute I graduated, suddenly everyone was asking me, ‚Well, when are you going to get married and start having kids?‘ And the truth is I had no idea how I would balance the expected role of wife and mother with a challenging career.

My mother was determined to make us independent. When I was four years old, she stopped the car a few miles from our house and made me find my own way home across the fields. I got hopelessly lost.

My mama never wore a pair of pants when I was growing up, and now that’s all she wears. It was so funny for me when I first started seeing Mama wear pants. It was like it wasn’t Mama. Now I’ve bought her many a pantsuit because she just lives in them.

I have made this letter longer than usual, only because I have not had the time to make it shorter.

I never thought I’d have children; I never thought I’d be in love, I never thought I’d meet the right person. Having come from a broken home – you kind of accept that certain things feel like a fairy tale, and you just don’t look for them.

One of the things I realized is that if you do not take control over your time and your life, other people will gobble it up. If you don’t prioritize yourself, you constantly start falling lower and lower on your list, your kids fall lower and lower on your list.

Kids will remind you that, even though you’ve gone down a road 100 times, it’s brand new for them – and that’s healthy.

I was 18 years old, and it was a dream come true for me to work out and eat great food for free. What else do you want in life? People think that is what it is like to be in a SEAL team, but it is less than a fraction of your career as a real SEAL.

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.

I grew up upper-class. Private school. My dad had a Jaguar. We’re African-American, and we work together as a family, so people assume we’re like the Jacksons. But I didn’t have parents using me to get out of a bad situation.

Beware the barrenness of a busy life.

I think everyone should experience defeat at least once during their career. You learn a lot from it.

When I am playing baseball, I give it all that I have on the ball field. When the ball game is over, I certainly don’t take it home. My little girl who is sitting out there wouldn’t know the difference between a third strike and a foul ball. We don’t talk about baseball at home.

For me, often, there’s such a cloud of melancholia about knowing I’m going to have to leave my daughter on her own. I don’t know what age that is going to be, thank God. It just doubles me up in grief.

Let all your things have their places; let each part of your business have its time.

If you’re working 50 hours a week to try to maintain family income, and your children have the kinds of aspirations that come from being flooded with television from age one, and associations have declined, people end up hopeless, even though they have every option.

I think your values are always influenced by your family and your community.

I didn’t have any children of my own.

If you’re living in your time, you cannot help but to write about the things that are important.

If I feel good about my parenting, I have no interest in judging other people’s choices. If I feel good about my body, I don’t go around making fun of other people’s weight or appearance. We’re hard on each other because we’re using each other as a launching pad out of our own perceived deficiency.

Yes, Mother. I can see you are flawed. You have not hidden it. That is your greatest gift to me.

Most people spend more time and energy going around problems than in trying to solve them.

My problem was my inability to spend much time at home. I thought my family was secure, so I went running around everyplace else. I guess I had more of an effect on other people’s kids than I did my own.

Any book that helps a child to form a habit of reading, to make reading one of his deep and continuing needs, is good for him.

The kids are a big part of my schedule.

In the nineties, everybody wants to talk about their rights and privileges. Twenty-five years ago, people talked about their obligations and responsibilities.

Call me Jonah. My parents did, or nearly did. They called me John.

Before I became a chief minister, I never thought that one day I’d be the chief minister.

I’m not great at bedtime stories. Bedtime stories are supposed to put the kid to sleep. My kid gets riled up and then my wife has to come in and go, ‚All right! Get out of the room.‘

Legacy is a stupid thing! I don’t want a legacy.

My own eight children all march to the beat of their inner music, and in some cases, it is definitely far away from what I hear. I’ve had to honor their instincts and their choices, and merely guided them out of harm’s way until they could be their own guides.

My mother was Catholic, my father was Protestant. There was always a debate going on at home – I think in those days we called them arguments – about who was right and who was wrong.

Tomorrow, every Fault is to be amended; but that Tomorrow never comes.

I was offered a job on Wall Street by my uncle. But I wanted to get out. Make-it-on-my-own kinda thing.

As a father and now a grandfather to three wonderful grandchildren, I know how magical the first year of a child’s life is but also how much hard work it takes. Being able to spend as much time as possible with your loved ones is absolutely vital, especially early on.

Many people take no care of their money till they come nearly to the end of it, and others do just the same with their time.

I was born in a very poor family. I used to sell tea in a railway coach as a child. My mother used to wash utensils and do lowly household work in the houses of others to earn a livelihood. I have seen poverty very closely. I have lived in poverty. As a child, my entire childhood was steeped in poverty.

I have 22 grandchildren and great-grandchildren, and they keep me young.

I did go to Wellesley, a women’s college. And I am of a kind of strange generation which is transitional in terms of women who wanted to go out and get jobs.

Three o’clock is always too late or too early for anything you want to do.

I want the concentration and the romance, and the worlds all glued together, fused, glowing: have no time to waste any more on prose.

I’d go to, like, six different schools in one year. We were on welfare, and my mom never ever worked.