My mother, I suppose, is still a main figure in my life because her life was so sad and unfair, and she so brave, but also because she was determined to make me into the Sunday-school-recitation little girl I was, from the age of seven or so, fighting not to be.

As I grow up, the lessons I learn in love and relationships and how we treat each other are hopefully maturing – hopefully.

To be a successful father… there’s one absolute rule: when you have a kid, don’t look at it for the first two years.

Successful people will always tell you you can do something. It’s the people who have never accomplished anything who will always discourage you from trying to achieve excellent things.

Really showing love requires more than just words.

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

Where there’s marriage without love, there will be love without marriage.

An intelligent man is sometimes forced to be drunk to spend time with his fools.

I’m sure like everyone else I’m not always the happiest if I don’t do a good job in quali or the race or whatever, so I think beating myself up sometimes makes me work harder.

Jealousy is both reasonable and belongs to reasonable men, while envy is base and belongs to the base, for the one makes himself get good things by jealousy, while the other does not allow his neighbour to have them through envy.

I don’t think I will ever be content. I am somebody who is always hungry.

Affluence means influence.

Food is everything we are. It’s an extension of nationalist feeling, ethnic feeling, your personal history, your province, your region, your tribe, your grandma. It’s inseparable from those from the get-go.

The former colonies, in Latin America in particular, have a better chance than ever before to overcome centuries of subjugation, violence and foreign intervention, which they have so far survived as dependencies with islands of luxury in a sea of misery.

Mickey Mouse popped out of my mind onto a drawing pad 20 years ago on a train ride from Manhattan to Hollywood at a time when business fortunes of my brother Roy and myself were at lowest ebb and disaster seemed right around the corner.

Reputation is the cornerstone of power. Through reputation alone you can intimidate and win; once it slips, however, you are vulnerable, and will be attacked on all sides. Make your reputation unassailable.

I met my husband before I became a star, and he doesn’t care about any of it.

Nothing’s ever easy as long as you go on living.

Truth is everybody is going to hurt you: you just gotta find the ones worth suffering for.

But in truth, should I meet with gold or spices in great quantity, I shall remain till I collect as much as possible, and for this purpose I am proceeding solely in quest of them.

Be nice to your children. After all, they are going to choose your nursing home.

So live with men as if God saw you and speak to God, as if men heard you.

It is the set of the sails, not the direction of the wind that determines which way we will go.

A friend to all is a friend to none.

If you’re treated a certain way you become a certain kind of person. If certain things are described to you as being real they’re real for you whether they’re real or not.

Imagine your family finally making it from nothing to something, and finally getting things going, and finally buying a beautiful house and taking care of your children – and the next day, it’s completely all gone. Zero. Boom. Flat broke. So that’s when I had to man up.

My husband is everything to me and without him it’s just not the same.

As a man sow, shall he reap. and I know that talk is cheap. But the heat of the battle is as sweet as the victory.

What is virtue but the Trade Unionism of the married?

If you get down and quarell everyday, you’re saying prayers to the devil, I say.

And ever has it been known that love knows not its own depth until the hour of separation.

Life is the childhood of our immortality.

No one loves the man whom he fears.

Love is the ability and willingness to allow those that you care for to be what they choose for themselves without any insistence that they satisfy you.

The one excellent thing that can be learned from a lion is that whatever a man intends doing should be done by him with a whole-hearted and strenuous effort.

My friends are my estate.

There’s nothing better than having a baby. I’ve always loved children. I used to work summers at the YMCA and be in charge of, like, 30 preschool kids. I knew that when I had a child, I’d be overwhelmed, and it’s true… I can’t tell you how much my attitude has changed since we’ve got Frances. Holding my baby is the best drug in the world.

Love alone is capable of uniting living beings in such a way as to complete and fulfill them, for it alone takes them and joins them by what is deepest in themselves.

It takes a great deal of bravery to stand up to our enemies, but just as much to stand up to our friends.

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

I don’t keep people around me that aren’t family. You don’t get to stay. Unless you’re eating at the table with us, you’re not part. We eat together, we cry together, we live together, we die together. Everything that we do is for each other, and we care for another.

I shook up the world, I shook up the world.

When the external factors over which one has no control in a way start to become negative, it starts to affect our creative juices.

Immense power is acquired by assuring yourself in your secret reveries that you were born to control affairs.

You have to be a bastard to make it, and that’s a fact. And the Beatles are the biggest bastards on earth.

Failure is simply the opportunity to begin again, this time more intelligently.

To survive it is often necessary to fight and to fight you have to dirty yourself.

I think about my own sons and my own daughters, and I’m sure that many parents are concerned about what their children are exposed to.

Must is a hard nut to crack, but it has a sweet kernel.

I didn’t know any gay people in my childhood.

Avoid having your ego so close to your position that when your position falls, your ego goes with it.

People like music when they’re in love, but they don’t need it as much. You need music when you’re missing someone or you’re pining for someone or you’re forgetting someone or you’re trying to process what just happened.

No one would choose a friendless existence on condition of having all the other things in the world.

My goal is just to be respected as a man when I walk down the street with my family. I don’t care what your job is, you’re not gonna talk down to me, you’re not gonna try to get a rise out of me. I’m a man first. And in establishing that, some interesting things have happened.

I don’t have a type. I don’t have a specific kind of human being. It’s just kind of an X-factor of sorts. Everybody I’ve ever dated has been a case-by-case situation.

A Scout is never taken by surprise; he knows exactly what to do when anything unexpected happens.

I hated school. Even to this day, when I see a school bus it’s just depressing to me. The poor little kids.

If one could be friendly with women, what a pleasure – the relationship so secret and private compared with relations with men. Why not write about it truthfully?

My kids are the funniest two human beings there are.

O, you men who think or say that I am malevolent, stubborn or misanthropic, how greatly do you wrong me. You do not know the secret cause which makes me seem that way to you, and I would have ended my life – it was only my art that held me back. Ah, it seemed impossible to leave the world until I had brought forth all that I felt was within me.

Real courage is when you know you’re licked before you begin, but you begin anyway and see it through no matter what.