The Americans at heart are a pure and noble people; things to them are in black and white. It’s either ‚rawk‘ or it’s not. We Brits putter around in the grey area.

I’m interested in the fact that the less secure a man is, the more likely he is to have extreme prejudice.

There are plenty of people who are, I think, completely racist who love hip-hop.

I really don’t like women who try to be men. All these politicians, I think they’re horrendous. We could have a brilliant future, but we have this terrible male vision of destroying everything. They’d better sort themselves out and become more womanly.

I think you could ask 10 English people the same question about class and get a very different answer.

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.

Everyone carries his own inch rule of taste, and amuses himself by applying it, triumphantly, wherever he travels.

Why is it so hard for people to believe that white people are poor?! I wouldn’t say I lived in a ghetto; I’d say I lived in the ‚hood. The same friends I had back then are the same people on tour with me now.

I hate the way they portray us in the media. If you see a black family it says they’re looting, if you see a white family it says they’re looking for food.

I like everything. Boyish girls, girlish boys, the heavy and the skinny. Which is a problem when I’m walking down the street.

Funny thing is that the poorer people are, the more generous they seem to be.

Nobody ever went broke underestimating the taste of the American public.

If you see a black family, it’s looting, but if it’s a white family they are looking for food.

Chefs are nutters. They’re all self-obsessed, delicate, dainty, insecure little souls and absolute psychopaths. Every last one of them.

My mom is American, so I was raised in her household in my formative years.

If women were particular about men’s characters, they would never get married at all.

I do not think you can name many great inventions that have been made by married men.

Every nation ridicules other nations, and all are right.

A man is more frank and sincere with his emotions than a woman. We girls, I’m afraid, have a tendency to hide our feelings.

We do stigmatise teens a lot and see them as scary and alien.

I would just say there is one misperception of our veterans, and that is they are somehow damaged goods. I don’t buy it.

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.

The problem with Yanks is they are wimps.

I love being American, and I love family. I love having a family, and I feel so blessed, and I feel like God gave me exactly what I wanted, so now I have to do the right thing in God’s eyes also. Just follow what God wants me to do.

Why do Jewish men die before their wives? They want to.

The education I received was a British education, in which British ideas, British culture, British institutions, were automatically assumed to be superior. There was no such thing as African culture.

You can be a little ungrammatical if you come from the right part of the country.

I often look ridiculous in Japan. There’s really no way to eat in Japan, particularly kaiseki in a traditional ryokan, without offending the Japanese horribly. Every gesture, every movement is just so atrociously wrong, and the more I try, the more hilarious it is.

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

I’m a bookworm. I know with my physical appearance that I don’t look like the typical reader. I’m in Barnes & Noble all the time, and you can look at people that look like they are supposed to be in there. I am in there, pants sagging, hat backwards.

People tend to think that because I’m a performer and I don’t go to a regular high school that I haven’t personally been affected by bullies. But it’s actually quite the contrary.

Is there something wrong with being a Muslim in this country? The answer’s no. That’s not America. Is there something wrong with some seven-year-old Muslim American kid believing that he or she could be president?

It was really hard for them to intimidate me. They felt I was intimidating. One of the growers had a name for me: I think it was ‚dragon lady‘ or something like it.

There is nothing the matter with Americans except their ideals. The real American is all right; it is the ideal American who is all wrong.

I think women go crazy for a reason. It’s not like it just happens.

Feminists wish women to seem like men. They’re not men.

We still think of a powerful man as a born leader and a powerful woman as an anomaly.

To be frank, it sometimes seems that the American idea of freedom has more to do with my freedom to do what I want than your freedom to do what you want. I think that, in Europe, we’re probably better at understanding how to balance those competing claims, though not a lot.

People have a negative impression of New York that I don’t think is quite fair.

I look like a woman, but I think like a man.

Too often the strong, silent man is silent only because he does not know what to say, and is reputed strong only because he has remained silent.

He had but one eye, and the popular prejudice runs in favor of two.

Why don’t Jews drink? It interferes with their suffering.

People take the little bit of information they’re fed, and they draw a picture of who you are. Most of the time, it’s wrong.

Every woman is supposed to have the same set of motives, or else to be a monster.

People do dismiss ambient music, don’t they? They call it ‚easy listening,‘ as if to suggest that it should be hard to listen to.

I’m married to an Italian woman, and I used to love cooking Italian at home, because it’s one-pot cooking. But my wife does not approve of my Italian cooking.

Savages we call them because their manners differ from ours.

Do creative, social, and civic attitudes change depending on where we live? Yes, I think so.

There are no second acts in American lives.

I don’t know why women want any of the things men have when one of the things that women have is men.

A businessman is the only man who is forever apologizing for his occupation.

In the public eye, girls and women with strong perspectives are hated. If you’re a girl with an opinion, people just hate you. There are still people who are afraid of successful women, and that’s so lame.

The English are predisposed to pride, the French to vanity.

If you look at U.S. history through religious history, there is very much a motif that shows the importance religion has played in the U.S. We’re a very religious country and it affects the way we look at various political issues.

People make jokes about my bosoms, why don’t they look underneath the breasts at the heart? It’s obvious I’ve got big ones and if people want to assume they’re not mine, then let them.

No intelligent black man or black woman in his or her right black mind wants white boys and white girls coming to their homes to marry their black sons and daughters.

All women become like their mothers. That is their tragedy. No man does. That’s his.

We sold ‚Seinfeld‘ all over the world but it was a very specific kind of show. In some countries it went down really well, in others they hated it.

For other nations, utopia is a blessed past never to be recovered; for Americans it is just beyond the horizon.

Stop this attitude that older people ain’t any good anymore! We’re as good as we ever were – if we ever were any good.