My dad always said, ‚Champ, the measure of a man is not how often he is knocked down, but how quickly he gets up.‘

Courage is being scared to death… and saddling up anyway.

Creativity is just connecting things. When you ask creative people how they did something, they feel a little guilty because they didn’t really do it, they just saw something. It seemed obvious to them after a while. That’s because they were able to connect experiences they’ve had and synthesize new things.

Begin noticing and being careful about keeping your imagination free of thoughts that you do not wish to materialize. Instead, initiate a practice of filling your creative thoughts to overflow with ideas and wishes that you fully intend to manifest. Honor your imaginings regardless of others seeing them as crazy or impossible.

When I am writing, I do not distinguish between the natural and supernatural. Everything seems real. That is my world, you could say.

The thermometer of success is merely the jealousy of the malcontents.

Example is leadership.

I dropped out of NYU, moved out of my parent’s house, got my own place, and survived on my own. I made music and worked my way from the bottom up.

Someone is sitting in the shade today because someone planted a tree a long time ago.

Hope is a waking dream.

When everything seems to be going against you, remember that the airplane takes off against the wind, not with it.

If you keep on writing for three years, every day, you should be strong. Of course, you have to be strong mentally, also. But in the first place, you have to be strong physically. That is a very important thing. Physically and mentally you have to be strong.

Believe that life is worth living and your belief will help create the fact.

The God who gave us life, gave us liberty at the same time.

Life can be boring unless you put some effort into it.

To hold a man down, you have to stay down with him.

In war as in life, it is often necessary when some cherished scheme has failed, to take up the best alternative open, and if so, it is folly not to work for it with all your might.

Unless you are breaking stuff, you are not moving fast enough.

I’m a big perfectionist! I’m trying to channel super-confident women like Alicia Keys, Mariah Carey and Beyonce, because I realized that if you want something, you really have to go for it, just like they do.

There are alway going to be bad things. But you can write it down and make a song out of it.

By appreciation, we make excellence in others our own property.

Ambition should be made of sterner stuff.

Neither a wise man nor a brave man lies down on the tracks of history to wait for the train of the future to run over him.

Years ago I met Richard Burton in Port Talbot, my home town, and afterwards he passed in his car with his wife, and I thought, ‚I want to get out and become like him‘. Not because of Wales, because I love Wales, but because I was so limited as a child at school and so bereft and lonely, and I thought becoming an actor would do that.

Your ability to use the principle of autosuggestion will depend, very largely, upon your capacity to concentrate upon a given desire until that desire becomes a burning obsession.

I know how to swim through backlash. I can tread water through backlash… If anything, that’s all giving me power.

Practice yourself, for heaven’s sake in little things, and then proceed to greater.

Great tragedy has come to us, and we are meeting it with the best that is in our country, with courage and concern for others because this is America. This is who we are.

I’m an all-or-nothing kind of guy, I guess.

For the past 33 years, I have looked in the mirror every morning and asked myself: ‚If today were the last day of my life, would I want to do what I am about to do today?‘ And whenever the answer has been ‚No‘ for too many days in a row, I know I need to change something.

In art, the hand can never execute anything higher than the heart can imagine.

Nothing is so strongly fortified that it cannot be taken by money.

I have a great respect for incremental improvement, and I’ve done that sort of thing in my life, but I’ve always been attracted to the more revolutionary changes. I don’t know why. Because they’re harder. They’re much more stressful emotionally. And you usually go through a period where everybody tells you that you’ve completely failed.

I’m not resigned, but I’m realistic too. The statistics in my case are very poor. Not many people come through esophageal cancer and live to talk about it, or not for long. And the other wager is, the part of the wager, it’s a certainty you’ll have a terrible time and you may wish you were dying because it’s an awful process.

Courage is knowing what not to fear.

Life isn’t meant to be easy. It’s hard to take being on the top – or on the bottom. I guess I’m something of a fatalist. You have to have a sense of history, I think, to survive some of these things… Life is one crisis after another.

You ask me if I keep a notebook to record my great ideas. I’ve only ever had one.

Success usually comes to those who are too busy to be looking for it.

If you plan on being anything less than you are capable of being, you will probably be unhappy all the days of your life.

In a magazine, one can get – from cover to cover – 15 to 20 different ideas about life and how to live it.

Imagine for yourself a character, a model personality, whose example you determine to follow, in private as well as in public.

When things are going bad, there’s going to be some good that’s going to come from it.

The strongest influences in my life and my work are always whomever I love. Whomever I love and am with most of the time, or whomever I remember most vividly. I think that’s true of everyone, don’t you?

My job is to bring out in people what they wouldn’t dare do themselves.

A warrior is not a person that carries a gun. The biggest war you ever go through is right between your own ears. It’s in your mind. We’re all going through a war in our mind, and we have to callus our mind to fight that war and to win that war.

He ate and drank the precious Words, his Spirit grew robust; He knew no more that he was poor, nor that his frame was Dust.

Throughout my career, I fed off the fuel of people not being able to understand me.

Ambition is the germ from which all growth of nobleness proceeds.

I struggled with being a broke college graduate, and while all my friends were getting career jobs, I was working horrible part-time jobs. That’s why now, even when I get tired, I think, ‚This is what I asked for.‘

You can’t knock on opportunity’s door and not be ready.

Pennies do not come from heaven. They have to be earned here on earth.

I have to keep improving myself and challenging myself.

You can’t be afraid to fail. It’s the only way you succeed – you’re not gonna succeed all the time, and I know that.

Find a beautiful piece of art. If you fall in love with Van Gogh or Matisse or John Oliver Killens, or if you fall love with the music of Coltrane, the music of Aretha Franklin, or the music of Chopin – find some beautiful art and admire it, and realize that that was created by human beings just like you, no more human, no less.

Wherever you go, go with all your heart.

Anything you really want, you can attain, if you really go after it.

The writer must believe that what he is doing is the most important thing in the world. And he must hold to this illusion even when he knows it is not true.

Human kindness has never weakened the stamina or softened the fiber of a free people. A nation does not have to be cruel to be tough.

It is hard to fail, but it is worse never to have tried to succeed.

I don’t know what can be so dangerous about giving people hope. Causing people to have better relationships. I’m not leading them to some false God or something like that.

When a person really desires something, all the universe conspires to help that person to realize his dream.