My connection with Brazil is so abstract. My blood and my way of thinking is Brazilian, but that’s it. I don’t tend to go back to the past, and although I have an apartment there, I rarely visit. When I move, I really move.

‚Jolene‘ has been very popular all of these years, even overseas.

In England, football is a big thing to talk about, but Liverpool, it’s a special place. You feel it when you make your first step.

Time is something that interests me a whole lot – past and present, and how the past appears as people change.

I’d like to be known for more than being the guy in the big suit.

We are tied to the ocean. And when we go back to the sea, whether it is to sail or to watch – we are going back from whence we came.

‚Evil men have no songs.‘ How is it that the Russians have songs?

The United States is definitely ahead in culture of innovation. If someone wants to accomplish great things, there is no better place than the U.S.

Information helps you to see that you’re not alone. That there’s somebody in Mississippi and somebody in Tokyo who all have wept, who’ve all longed and lost, who’ve all been happy. So the library helps you to see, not only that you are not alone, but that you’re not really any different from everyone else.

Our heritage and ideals, our code and standards – the things we live by and teach our children – are preserved or diminished by how freely we exchange ideas and feelings.

By its birth, and for all time, Christianity is pledged to the Cross and dominated by the sign of the Cross. It cannot remain its own self except by identifying itself ever more intensely with the essence of the Cross.

Impart as much as you can of your spiritual being to those who are on the road with you, and accept as something precious what comes back to you from them.

In this bright future you can’t forget your past.

I always was a Christian… whatsoever a man thinks in his heart is who he is.

Puerto Rico’s relationship with music is everything. It’s an island full of talent and if you grow up there, you grow up living and breathing music.

I remain just one thing, and one thing only, and that is a clown. It places me on a far higher plane than any politician.

Sometimes I wonder if I’m as famous for my wheelchair and disabilities as I am for my discoveries.

I read so much stuff that black women say, especially about my relationship. ‚Oh, he left his black wife to go be with some exotic chick.‘ First of all, my girl is black: she’s Jamaican.

To our critical eyes, the threads of which the past is woven are, by nature, endless and indivisible. Scientifically speaking, we cannot grasp the absolute beginning of anything: everything extends backwards to be prolonged by something else.

What I can say is that all my characters are searching for their souls, because they are my mirrors. I’m someone who is constantly trying to understand my place in the world, and literature is the best way that I found in order to see myself.

A deep sense of love and belonging is an irreducible need of all people. We are biologically, cognitively, physically, and spiritually wired to love, to be loved, and to belong. When those needs are not met, we don’t function as we were meant to. We break. We fall apart. We numb. We ache. We hurt others. We get sick.

What’s fascinating is, people in Washington would rather spend time in Hollywood, and people in Hollywood would rather spend time in Washington.

I had one incident where my daughter said that a girl asked if she was a brown person. I said, ‚We’re black. You have black people, white people, Chinese people, Hispanic people; we’re all brought up differently.‘

I was not encouraged to follow the career of a writer because my parents thought that I was going to starve to death. They thought nobody can make a living from being a writer in Brazil. They were not wrong.

Americans move more than 10 times over the course of a lifetime.

I definitely think, generally, rap is misogynistic.

I always have been an activist for things that were just authentically a part of my life, that I felt connected to.

Hip-hop is ever changing but you’ll always have the pack. And you’ll always have those people who are separated from the pack.

Think about what people are doing on Facebook today. They’re keeping up with their friends and family, but they’re also building an image and identity for themselves, which in a sense is their brand. They’re connecting with the audience that they want to connect to. It’s almost a disadvantage if you’re not on it now.

The free world must not prove itself worthy of its own past.

We Jews have a secret weapon in our struggle with the Arabs; we have no place to go.

In South Korea, they believe that when you turn 60, you’ve become a baby again and the rest of your life should be totally about joy and happiness, and people should leave you alone, and I just think that that’s the height of intelligence.

Everywhere I go, the kids call me ‚the book lady.‘ The older I get, the more appreciative I seem to be of the ‚book lady‘ title. It makes me feel more like a legitimate person, not just a singer or an entertainer. But it makes me feel like I’ve done something good with my life and with my success.

A nation’s culture resides in the hearts and in the soul of its people.

It would be an egregious mistake to ever refer to me in the same breath as most of the people I write about.

You do indeed have a past, but not now! And, yes, you have a future, but not now! You can consume your now with thoughts of ‚then‘ and ‚maybe,‘ but that will keep you from the inner peace you could experience.

I think I lived those years very impersonally. It was almost as though I had erected someone outside myself who was the president’s wife. I was lost somewhere deep down inside myself. That is the way I felt and worked until I left the White House.

I am a pure-blooded Polish nobleman without a single drop of bad blood – certainly not German blood.

I can simply tell you that since I was a kid, I didn’t like to look like anyone else.

The myths underlying our culture and underlying our common sense have not taught us to feel identical with the universe, but only parts of it, only in it, only confronting it – aliens.

We see God face to face every hour, and know the savor of Nature.

Because I’m small, I’ve been called things from ‚Happy Feet‘ to ‚Little Face.‘

You can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something – your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. This approach has never let me down, and it has made all the difference in my life.

I love hugging people. I still hug everybody in my meet-and-greet lines.

Could a greater miracle take place than for us to look through each other’s eyes for an instant?

I don’t see myself as a pop artist. Like, when you hear ‚pop,‘ you’re like, ‚Oh, bubblegum, jumpy little girly stuff,‘ and I feel like, ‚Uh-uh. That’s not me.‘

If you can feel that Mother Earth is in you, and you are Mother Earth, then you are not any longer afraid to die because the earth is not dying. Like a wave appears and disappears and appears again.

We all sort of do want incentives for creative people to still exist at a certain level. You know, maybe rock stars shouldn’t make as much; who knows? But you want as much creativity to take place in the future as took place in the past.

One of the most important things you learn from the Internet is that there is no ‚them‘ out there. It’s just an awful lot of ‚us.‘

I’ve come to the conclusion that mythology is really a form of archaeological psychology. Mythology gives you a sense of what a people believes, what they fear.

Before I became a film major, I was very heavily into social science, I had done a lot of sociology, anthropology, and I was playing in what I call social psychology, which is sort of an offshoot of anthropology/sociology – looking at a culture as a living organism, why it does what it does.

I really miss being able to blend in with people.

I have moved to a smaller house in Paris, and I don’t fancy having so much staff now.

No people come into possession of a culture without having paid a heavy price for it.

I’m the proof – you can’t throw away tradition.

What a liberation to realize that the ‚voice in my head‘ is not who I am. ‚Who am I, then?‘ The one who sees that.

The free soul is rare, but you know it when you see it – basically because you feel good, very good, when you are near or with them.

The future influences the present just as much as the past.

I have found that no exertion of the legs can bring two minds much nearer to one another.

In order to speak about all and to all, one has to speak of what all know and of the reality common to us all. The sea, rains, necessity, desire, the struggle against death… these are things that unite us all.

The people of England are the most enthusiastic in the world.