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

My sisters like cooking at my place. It has a bit more room, and the food tastes a little bit better. A big pot of spaghetti and sauce, some warm French bread – works all the time. I think I’ve been eating pasta for 26 years.

The mind of a 19-year-old is very different from the mind of a 26-year-old. You grow. You get into better relationships. You experience more, meet more people, better people. But when you’re in a dark hole at an earlier point in your life – you write about the mindset you’re in at that moment.

I know that I’m not the easiest person to live with. The challenge I put on myself is so great that the person I live with feels himself challenged. I bring a lot to bear, and I don’t know how not to.

The older I get, the better I understand that every day is a gift.

As I got older, I guess I became more mellow and more forgiving and more loving.

I have a lot of other stuff to accomplish before I get to kids. Whenever the time is right, I’ll just know. If I had a girl, she’d probably be really rebellious. She would be like a bundle of karma. I would love to bring them up in Barbados.

This is what is hardest: to close the open hand because one loves.

The good parts of a book may be only something a writer is lucky enough to overhear or it may be the wreck of his whole damn life and one is as good as the other.

Work is love made visible. And if you cannot work with love but only with distaste, it is better that you should leave your work and sit at the gate of the temple and take alms of those who work with joy.

I have fallen in love with the imagination. And if you fall in love with the imagination, you understand that it is a free spirit. It will go anywhere, and it can do anything.

The demand to be loved is the greatest of all arrogant presumptions.

By taking a second wife he pays the highest compliment to the first, by showing that she made him so happy as a married man, that he wishes to be so a second time.

All the awards in the world, you can get into all the nightclubs, they’ll send you the nicest clothes. Nothing better than walking into your dad’s restaurant and seeing a smile on his face and knowing that your mom and dad and your sister are real proud of you.

Of all the things which wisdom provides to make us entirely happy, much the greatest is the possession of friendship.

I am sorry to say that there is too much point to the wisecrack that life is extinct on other planets because their scientists were more advanced than ours.

Let us beware of saying that death is the opposite of life. The living being is only a species of the dead, and a very rare species.

There is as much greatness of mind in acknowledging a good turn, as in doing it.

It has been hard for me to find it, but I have found love.

I’ve been very fortunate.

You should hurry up and acquire the cigar habit. It’s one of the major happinesses. And so much more lasting than love, so much less costly in emotional wear and tear.

Absence and death are the same – only that in death there is no suffering.

My family has very strong women. My mother never laughed at my dream of Africa, even though everyone else did because we didn’t have any money, because Africa was the ‚dark continent‘, and because I was a girl.

Each life is made up of mistakes and learning, waiting and growing, practicing patience and being persistent.

If life is a checker game, someone else is moving the pieces. It isn’t us. Don’t be surprised by amazing coincidences. There are no accidents. Consider, as I learned to do, the incredible interconnectedness of all of life.

I understand that being able to appeal to the public and having an amazing sense of humour is not something that comes easy. It’s definitely a gift and for which I’m thankful.

Love all, trust a few, do wrong to none.

It was weird to be married; you kind of lose your identity. You’re suddenly somebody’s wife. And you’re like, ‚Oh, I’m half of a couple now. I’ve lost me.‘

For small creatures such as we the vastness is bearable only through love.

I thank God for my failures. Maybe not at the time but after some reflection. I never feel like a failure just because something I tried has failed.

I’ll promise to go easier on drinking and to get to bed earlier, but not for you, fifty thousand dollars, or two-hundred and fifty thousand dollars will I give up women. They’re too much fun.

I don’t know if I particularly want to be remembered for anything. I personally do not think I’m a great gift to the world. I’ve been very fortunate.

But I always think that the best way to know God is to love many things.

I approach love differently now that I know it’s hard for it to work out.

When you have really exhausted an experience you always reverence and love it.

We awaken in others the same attitude of mind we hold toward them.

You should not have taken advantage of my sensibility to steal into my affections without my consent.

I think about the milestones from my childhood and what it will be like to watch our kids go through them. Taking Riley to her first day of school was a whirlwind. I can’t imagine what middle school is going to be like, and high school, and graduation.

Your joy comes from how you think, the choices that we make in life.

My mother would kill me if I posed nude! My mother raised me with certain standards.

Obviously, you go through a lot of emotional turmoil in a divorce.

My most brilliant achievement was my ability to be able to persuade my wife to marry me.

Remember that a gesture of friendship, no matter how small, is always appreciated.

In this world of sin and sorrow there is always something to be thankful for; as for me, I rejoice that I am not a Republican.

Old age is not a matter for sorrow. It is matter for thanks if we have left our work done behind us.

When I found somebody who I fell in love with, it made me feel different than I felt the rest of the day. It was electrifying. That’s what inspired the ‚Off to the Races‘ melodies. That’s one of the times when you’re feeling electrified by someone else and they make you happy to be alive.

One of the most basic factors in sports is that winning becomes a habit, and losing is the same way. When failure starts to feel normal in your life or your work or even your darkest vices, you won’t have to go looking for trouble, because trouble will find you. Count on it.

To be loved is very demoralizing.

Chaos often breeds life, when order breeds habit.

We never live; we are always in the expectation of living.

I have found the paradox, that if you love until it hurts, there can be no more hurt, only more love.

Men who think that a woman’s past love affairs lessen her love for them are usually stupid and weak.

My mami and papi love my music. They’re always listening to the radio waiting for one of my songs to come on. And when it does, they turn up the volume – and turn it back down when it’s over.

If I’m gonna write songs about my exes, they can write songs about me. That’s how it works.

When I was a child I asked my mother what homosexuality was about and she said – and this was 100 years ago in Germany and she was very open-minded – ‚It’s like hair color. It’s nothing. Some people are blond and some people have dark hair. It’s not a subject.‘ This was a very healthy attitude.

The universe is transformation: life is opinion.

Civilisations have been destroyed many times, and this civilisation is no different. It can be destroyed. We can think of time in terms of millions of years and life will resume little by little. The cosmos operates for us very urgently, but geological time is different.

To the wise, life is a problem; to the fool, a solution.

Confront a corpse at least once. The absolute absence of life is the most disturbing and challenging confrontation you will ever have.

If you would be loved, love, and be loveable.

But that intimacy of mutual embarrassment, in which each feels that the other is feeling something, having once existed, its effect is not to be done away with.