Just talk to me as a father – not what the Constitution says. What do you feel?

Where does discontent start? You are warm enough, but you shiver. You are fed, yet hunger gnaws you. You have been loved, but your yearning wanders in new fields. And to prod all these there’s time, the Bastard Time.

Always make those above you feel comfortably superior. In your desire to please or impress them, do not go too far in displaying your talents or you might accomplish the opposite – inspire fear and insecurity.

My readers – and I get 400 emails for a day, my readers normally they say, well, you understand me, and I answer, you do understand me also. We are in the same level.

We are tired of aristocratic explanations in Harvard words.

Action seems to follow feeling, but really action and feeling go together; and by regulating the action, which is under the more direct control of the will, we can indirectly regulate the feeling, which is not.

If there is any one secret of success, it lies in the ability to get the other person’s point of view and see things from that person’s angle as well as from your own.

What loneliness is more lonely than distrust?

My friends ask me if I want more kids, and I always say yes, I want more; it’s the best thing you can have in your life.

Not to expose your true feelings to an adult seems to be instinctive from the age of seven or eight onwards.

A lack of transparency results in distrust and a deep sense of insecurity.

Discretion of speech is more than eloquence, and to speak agreeably to him with whom we deal is more than to speak in good words, or in good order.

A letter does not blush.

Fiction is not necessarily about what you know, it’s about how you feel. That is the truth about fiction, and the other truth is that all science is a tool, and we use our tools not to actualise what we know, but to implement how we feel.

There is no waste of time in life like that of making explanations.

Nothing is so unbelievable that oratory cannot make it acceptable.

All of our reasoning ends in surrender to feeling.

I think it’s brought the world a lot closer together, and will continue to do that. There are downsides to everything; there are unintended consequences to everything. The most corrosive piece of technology that I’ve ever seen is called television – but then, again, television, at its best, is magnificent.

Early on, when I was quite young and going from job to job, I was foolish enough to sometimes speak to my fellow workers: ‚Hey, the boss can come in here at any moment and lay all of us off, just like that, don’t you realize that?‘ They would just look at me. I was posing something that they didn’t want to enter their minds.

I have an urge to communicate. I think I’m a change from what it would be like dating a normal guy who doesn’t talk too much.

A lot of the time when I write about the person that I love, I feel like I’m writing about New York.

I can be jubilant one moment and pensive the next, and a cloud could go by and make that happen.

Since the child knew his parents would give in, he tried the same trick again and again.

I take my kids to school. And if I go to work, I go to work, and they visit me on set. I come home. I have dinner with my family. I have breakfast with my family. I have a very solid, very warm home.

I was kind of secretly hoping one of my kids would go out and make a million bucks. So when they put me in a home, at least I’ll have a window with a view.

I never did give anybody hell. I just told the truth and they thought it was hell.

One often contradicts an opinion when what is uncongenial is really the tone in which it was conveyed.

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

Letters are among the most significant memorial a person can leave behind them.

Love is a gross exaggeration of the difference between one person and everybody else.

Nothing becomes so offensive so quickly as grief. When fresh it finds someone to console it, but when it becomes chronic, it is ridiculed, and rightly.

A fundamentalist can’t bring himself or herself to negotiate with people who disagree with them because the negotiating process itself is an indication of implied equality.

If you want a love message to be heard, it has got to be sent out. To keep a lamp burning, we have to keep putting oil in it.

Character may almost be called the most effective means of persuasion.

If I ever felt like I was getting lost in the hurricane that was storming around Nirvana, I’d just go back to Virginia.

Love can consign us to hell or to paradise, but it always takes us somewhere.

I’m trying to make God more relevant in our society. And I think talking in everyday terms and making sure people can understand it – I think that’s important.

I was nauseous and tingly all over. I was either in love or I had smallpox.

The essence of lying is in deception, not in words.

You hear doom and gloom about the Internet ruining young people’s command of English – that’s nonsense.

If you remember me, then I don’t care if everyone else forgets.

Where there is reverence there is fear, but there is not reverence everywhere that there is fear, because fear presumably has a wider extension than reverence.

All things considered, there’s nobody better for children than parents.

To be loved is very demoralizing.

In general my children refuse to eat anything that hasn’t danced in television.

It should be possible to explain the laws of physics to a barmaid.

Well, the thing that I learned as a diplomat is that human relations ultimately make a huge difference.

My mother did not like children.

Someday I want to have children and give them all the love I never had.

Children are educated by what the grown-up is and not by his talk.

It is usually the imagination that is wounded first, rather than the heart; it being much more sensitive.

No, we don’t own our children. Our parental privilege is to love them, to lead them, and to let them go.

Hear reason, or she’ll make you feel her.

Cry if you have a compound fracture, by all means. Or if your grandpa died. But otherwise, save it for your pillow.

I once did a three-hour interview with Radio Oxford only to be told the microphone hadn’t picked me up.

Of course, ‚I Will Always Love You‘ is the biggest song so far in my career. I’m famous for several, but that one has been recorded by more people and made me more money, I think, than all of them. But that song did come from a true and deep place in my heart.

My mother insisted that her children read.

Who in their infinite wisdom decreed that Little League uniforms be white? Certainly not a mother.

I want to negotiate what I’m worth. I want to put my analytics forward, man-to-man, and to be like, ‚This is what I’m owed now. Pay me.‘ And then we can talk.

I just think you ought to talk straight with your people.

My father wasn’t around when I was a kid, and I used to always say, ‚Why me? Why don’t I have a father? Why isn’t he around? Why did he leave my mother?‘ But as I got older I looked deeper and thought, ‚I don’t know what my father was going through, but if he was around all the time, would I be who I am today?‘