The drama and the trauma of the relationship you have when you’re 16 can mirror the one you have when you’re 26. Life repeats itself.

My focus is to forget the pain of life. Forget the pain, mock the pain, reduce it. And laugh.

I would love to continue in music, with writing… but I am not the kind of person who will hang around if I start to become irrelevant. If that happens, I will bow down gracefully, raise my kids, and have a garden. And I am going to let my hair go gray when I am older. I don’t need to be blonde when I’m 60!

I’m kind of fascist with myself, you know.

‚Eastern Promises‘ is great.

It’s very hard to find your own words – and you don’t actually exist until you have your own words.

I am never satisfied with myself and that is what keeps me going – I have no post-satisfaction.

If I were not a physicist, I would probably be a musician. I often think in music. I live my daydreams in music. I see my life in terms of music.

If a man had more than one life, I think a little hanging would not hurt this one; but after he is once dead, we cannot bring him back, no matter how sorry we may be; so the boy shall be pardoned.

I’m just a friendly person; that runs in my family.

The secret of success in life is for a man to be ready for his opportunity when it comes.

If you have the ability to pick yourself up by the bootstraps and start over, you come out stronger because you learn from whatever mistakes you made.

For me, there are two types of people: the young and the experienced.

Although the life of a person is in a land full of thorns and weeds, there is always a space in which the good seed can grow. You have to trust God.

When I did A Soldier’s Story, I was very young and green and thought I knew everything-now I know I know everything!

Action may not bring happiness but there is no happiness without action.

We are shaped by our thoughts; we become what we think. When the mind is pure, joy follows like a shadow that never leaves.

I really have had to swallow my own prejudice at times.

You have to develop ways so that you can take up for yourself, and then you take up for someone else. And so sooner or later, you have enough courage to really stand up for the human race and say, ‚I’m a representative.‘

The thing I always say to people is this: ‚If you avoid failure, you also avoid success.‘

The greatest mistake you can make in life is continually fearing that you’ll make one.

My wife and I don’t compete. We know each other’s preferences, and we work to provide those for each other. One will take over when the other is faced with something he or she dislikes. That’s what friends do.

Your timeless self does not age and has no fear of the future. Contemplate your physical self and all its possessions, and practice laughing peacefully at it all.

I was extremely lucky that I had two great wives. It sounds a bit funny to say that, but it’s absolutely true.

The best of us must sometimes eat our words.

If you get your ego in your way, you will only look to other people and circumstances to blame.

There was never yet fair woman but she made mouths in a glass.

You accept that this civilisation could be abolished and life will begin later on after a few thousand years because that is something that has happened in the history of this planet. When you have peace in yourself and accept, then you are calm enough to do something, but if you are carried by despair there is no hope.

Whatever the universal nature assigns to any man at any time is for the good of that man at that time.

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.

Mothers and daughters generally have fairly complex relationships, and ours was made much more so by Mother’s illness. She had Parkinson’s disease, which was not diagnosed for a long time… All that made me very self-protective, because for one thing, I didn’t want to get trapped.

A person who is truly authentic doesn’t need to play a role in life, we think, but can simply be him – or herself.

God is cruel. Sometimes he makes you live.

In retrospect, I can see I couldn’t talk to people face to face, so I got on stage and started screaming and squealing and twitching about. Ha! Like, that sure made sense!

Assuming if there’s such a thing as reality, if you have a false relationship with it, how can you do anything but fail?

In the real world, children love me.

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.

Marriage is the most natural state of man, and… the state in which you will find solid happiness.

We acquire the strength we have overcome.

When one has finished building one’s house, one suddenly realizes that in the process one has learned something that one really needed to know in the worst way – before one began.

Woman, or more precisely put, perhaps, marriage, is the representative of life with which you are meant to come to terms.

My songs have always been frustrating themes, relationships that I’ve had. And now that I’m in love, I expect it to be really happy, or at least there won’t be half as much anger as there was.

If I’d married someone in show business, there’d be too much competition.

If you love life, don’t waste time, for time is what life is made up of.

Seriousness is the only refuge of the shallow.

That is my wish, hope, instruction for all of you: Take your education seriously, okay? Always do that. Because I wouldn’t be here today if it weren’t for my education.

Be courteous to all, but intimate with few, and let those few be well tried before you give them your confidence.

No change of circumstances can repair a defect of character.

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

Mars is the only place in the solar system where it’s possible for life to become multi-planetarian.

If I shall exist eternally, how shall I exist tomorrow?

Few men would dare to read their own autobiography if all their deeds were recorded in it; few can look back upon their entire career without a blush.

I write for no other purpose than to add to the beauty that now belongs to me. I write a book for no other reason than to add three or four hundred acres to my magnificent estate.

Confusion of goals and perfection of means seems, in my opinion, to characterize our age.

It seems, in fact, as though the second half of a man’s life is made up of nothing, but the habits he has accumulated during the first half.

Life’s a rollercoaster. You’re up one minute; you’re down one minute. But who doesn’t like rollercoasters?

Love has reasons which reason cannot understand.

A new command I give you: Love one another. As I have loved you, so you must love one another.

Knowledge can be communicated, but not wisdom. One can find it, live it, be fortified by it, do wonders through it, but one cannot communicate and teach it.

When I was in college I did a lot of stupid things and I don’t want to make an excuse for that. Some of the things that people accuse me of are true, some of them aren’t. There are pranks, IMs.

If we hope for what we are not likely to possess, we act and think in vain, and make life a greater dream and shadow than it really is.