My family is very good about visiting me, and other friends as well.

At the age of 6, a teacher full of ambitions, who taught in the small public school of Biran, convinced my family that I should travel to Santiago de Cuba to accompany my older sister who would enter a highly prestigious convent school. Including me was a skill of that very teacher from the little school in Biran.

Crankiness is at the essence of all comedy. My wife and I were discussing the different types of cranky. There’s entertaining cranky, annoying cranky, angry cranky.

My favorite thing in life is writing about life, specifically the parts of life concerning love. Because, as far as I’m concerned, love is absolutely everything.

Quarrel? Nonsense; we have not quarreled. If one is not to get into a rage sometimes, what is the good of being friends?

If the Great Way perishes there will morality and duty. When cleverness and knowledge arise great lies will flourish. When relatives fall out with one another there will be filial duty and love. When states are in confusion there will be faithful servants.

No one will ever win the battle of the sexes; there’s too much fraternizing with the enemy.

Nothing is as obnoxious as other people’s luck.

What’s so beautiful about Miami is that we support each other. We’re just one big family, not just the entertainers, just everyone in general.

I would be married, but I’d have no wife, I would be married to a single life.

Men are April when they woo, December when they wed. Maids are May when they are maids, but the sky changes when they are wives.

My family has never been there for me. They expect things because we’re blood.

Don’t ever call a guy first. The thing they want the most is whatever they can’t have. It sounds really juvenile, but it works.

There is nothing which has yet been contrived by man, by which so much happiness is produced as by a good tavern.

Friendship is always a sweet responsibility, never an opportunity.

Clearly this is a tough economic time, and a lot of families are hurting. So when we talk to parents, we talk about small changes for kids and things that don’t cost extra money. Like adding water and eliminating sugary drinks and sodas. That’s going to save money right there. Or adding a few more vegetables.

Every parting gives a foretaste of death, every reunion a hint of the resurrection.

Hatred is an affair of the heart; contempt that of the head.

Morality is simply the attitude we adopt towards people whom we personally dislike.

I’m a human being and I fall in love and sometimes I don’t have control of every situation.

The difficult thing is that vulnerability is the first thing I look for in you and the last thing I’m willing to show you. In you, it’s courage and daring. In me, it’s weakness.

We’re hardwired for connection. There’s no arguing with the bioscience. But we can want it so badly we’re trying to hot-wire it.

It is not true that people are naturally equal for no two people can be together for even a half an hour without one acquiring an evident superiority over the other.

I want kids. I want a soccer team, and I want a husband.

I’m a girls‘ girl. I have guy friends, but the problem with having guy friends is, like, I always get linked to them, and they’ll end up in a slideshow of people I’ve apparently dated on the Internet.

Within one’s own family, money is not the measure of things, unless the person is an absolute Scrooge. Only the most extreme kind of monster would put a price on everything.

Life guided me to being a bodyguard, protecting people, then in the movies, so I’m happy with everything because basically all I ever wanted to do was be a good son and take care of my mother.

Before I started school striking I had no energy, no friends and I didn’t speak to anyone. I just sat alone at home, with an eating disorder. All of that is gone now, since I have found a meaning, in a world that sometimes seems shallow and meaningless to so many people.

It is a true rule that love is ever rewarded, either with the reciproque or with an inward and secret contempt.

That’s what a man wants in a wife, mostly; he wants to make sure one fool tells him he’s wise.

America is the student who defies the odds to become the first in a family to go to college – the citizen who defies the cynics and goes out there and votes – the young person who comes out of the shadows to demand the right to dream. That’s what America is about.

Women may fall when there’s no strength in men.

Love is something far more than desire for sexual intercourse; it is the principal means of escape from the loneliness which afflicts most men and women throughout the greater part of their lives.

You know what, I’m very attracted to someone who makes me laugh and is that charming. Really, I could be charmed by anyone. I’m just a sucker for somebody that is charming.

Before marriage, a girl has to make love to a man to hold him. After marriage, she has to hold him to make love to him.

It is really very important while you are young to live in an environment in which there is no fear. Most of us, as we grow older, become frightened; we are afraid of living, afraid of losing a job, afraid of tradition, afraid of what the neighbours, or what the wife or husband would say, afraid of death.

It’s annoying, but justice and equality are mates. Aren’t they? Justice always wants to hang out with equality. And equality is a real pain.

When I’m writing, I don’t feel neurotic. So it’s better for the family if I’m working.

Love begins by taking care of the closest ones – the ones at home.

I have rules for a lot of areas of my life. Love is not going to be one of them.

Women have always been the strong ones of the world. The men are always seeking from women a little pillow to put their heads down on. They are always longing for the mother who held them as infants.

Disagreement is something normal.

I am getting to the point where the only love worth being in is the love worth singing about.

Fame may go by and – so long, I’ve had you.

The true worth of a man is not to be found in man himself, but in the colours and textures that come alive in others.

Accident counts for as much in companionship as in marriage.

Whether I’m running on the beach without my shirt or whether I’m going out with my kids or going to church or going out to dinner – I don’t choose to insulate myself in engaging in real life. Hence, the public kind of almost knows me as much through my real life that they see through the rag mags.

There is nothing in the world like the devotion of a married woman. It is a thing no married man knows anything about.

Accept the things to which fate binds you, and love the people with whom fate brings you together, but do so with all your heart.

Counsel with your parents is a privilege at any age.

The only big things I’ve purchased are my dad’s heart valve and a Rolls-Royce for my parents, for their anniversary. And that was only because my dad had a Lady Gaga license plate on our old car and it was making me crazy because he was getting followed everywhere, so I bought him a new car.

People who have given us their complete confidence believe that they have a right to ours. The inference is false, a gift confers no rights.

Sometimes it’s a form of love just to talk to somebody that you have nothing in common with and still be fascinated by their presence.

When I was young, an eccentric uncle decided to teach me how to lie. Not, he explained, because he wanted me to lie, but because he thought I should know how it’s done so I would recognise when I was being lied to.

We have to distrust each other. It is our only defense against betrayal.

May we so love as never to have occasion to repent of our love!

I never fall in love.

For the woman, the man is a means: the end is always the child.

I’ve lost both parents in the last two years, so you pick up on that stuff. That’s the most terrible thing about being an author – standing there at your mother’s funeral, but you don’t switch the author off. So your own innermost thoughts are grist for the mill.

I believe a marriage is between a man and a woman.

It is very hard to not be able to engage with people in a real and honest way because they either want something from me, or they see me as something that I simply am not.