The writing is important, but the way you say the line and the pause you give it, the facial expression – all of that is very important.

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

I think humans are just hard-wired to process people’s faces and understand meaning and expression at such a more granular level than other types of communication.

Without freedom, no art; art lives only on the restraints it imposes on itself, and dies of all others.

I write from my soul. This is the reason that critics don’t hurt me, because it is me. If it was not me, if I was pretending to be someone else, then this could unbalance my world, but I know who I am.

Just talk to me as a father – not what the Constitution says. What do you feel?

I have written a book. This will come as quite a shock to some. They didn’t think I could read, much less write.

My first phone was two tin cans tied together with string, and it worked pretty good.

I think every entertainer’s had nights when things go wrong. I mean you can’t remember everything all the time, and especially if you’re having hard times personally, things going on that you – you know, and then people make it worse. And that makes you feel worse.

I no longer feel attracted to the well-made novel. I want to write the story that will zero in and give you intense, but not connected, moments of experience. I guess that’s the way I see life. People remake themselves bit by bit and do things they don’t understand.

Official dignity tends to increase in inverse ratio to the importance of the country in which the office is held.

You can’t build a plot out of jokes. You need tragic relief. And you need to let people know that when a lot of frightened people are running around with edged weaponry, there are deaths. Stupid deaths, usually. I’m not writing ‚The A-Team‘ – if there’s a fight going on, people will get hurt. Not letting this happen would be a betrayal.

I write in order to attain that feeling of tension relieved and function achieved which a cow enjoys on giving milk.

Peace comes when you talk to the guy you most hate. And that’s where the courage of a leader comes, because when you sit down with your enemy, you as a leader must already have very considerable confidence from your own constituency.

The greatest service that can be offered to children who show personality traits or inclinations that might not be understood by the adults around them is to allow them to express their own unique humanity.

There are half a dozen subjects that I return to time and time again, and that doesn’t bother me. Because most of my favorite writers do that, to hunt down the same topic or theme from different directions each time.

At one time, you could sit on the Rue de la Paix in Paris or at the Habima Theater in Tel Aviv or in Medina and you could see a person come in, black, white, it didn’t matter. You said, ‚That’s an American‘ because there’s a readiness to smile and to talk to people.

I don’t have any oratory skills. But I would not use them if I had.

We don’t get to know people when they come to us; we must go to them to find out what they are like.

Perhaps when music has been shouting for so long, a quieter voice seems attractive.

Time was when they that feared the Lord spake often to one another; I am afraid that now they more often speak one against another.

When I look at public opinion, I’m not far out of the mainstream. I’m in it, in many respects. In some respects, public opinion goes beyond anything I’ve ever said.

Dictionaries are like watches, the worst is better than none and the best cannot be expected to go quite true.

The ear is the only true writer and the only true reader.

We don’t need to share the same opinions as others, but we need to be respectful.

If you can’t convince them, confuse them.

Be not a slave of words.

The beauty of me being on stage is I have a voice.

If you wish to be a success in the world, promise everything, deliver nothing.

One of my big goals as a human being is to continue to write what’s really happening to me, even if it’s a tough pill to swallow for people around me… I do fear that if I ever were to have someone in my life who mattered, I would second-guess every one of my lyrics.

Rhetoric may be defined as the faculty of observing in any given case the available means of persuasion. This is not a function of any other art.

It is in this power of saying everything, and yet saying nothing too plainly, that the perfection of art consists.

There is always another way to say the same thing that doesn’t look at all like the way you said it before. I don’t know what the reason for this is. I think it is somehow a representation of the simplicity of nature.

Back, you know, a few generations ago, people didn’t have a way to share information and express their opinions efficiently to a lot of people. But now they do. Right now, with social networks and other tools on the Internet, all of these 500 million people have a way to say what they’re thinking and have their voice be heard.

That is how you get to be a writer, incidentally: you feel somehow marginal, somehow slightly off-balance all the time.

A poet never takes notes. You never take notes in a love affair.

I’ve got no need to prove to myself that I can do Shakespeare. I’ve done it.

Having listened to great songwriters like James Taylor and Carole King, I felt there was nothing new that was coming out that really represented me and the way I felt. So I started writing my own stuff.

By giving people the power to share, we’re making the world more transparent.

Give every man thy ear, but few thy voice.

I don’t want to just preach to the church. I feel like I have a broader message.

I am an introvert; privately I am very shy, and I don’t speak unless I have to.

A fundamentalist can’t bring himself or herself to negotiate with people who disagree with them because the negotiating process itself is an indication of implied equality.

The best author will be the one who is ashamed to become a writer.

Who hears me, who understands me, becomes mine, a possession for all time.

Words are more treacherous and powerful than we think.

To the extent I am known, I think I am known as a person who expresses his opinion freely about things – and I was sensitive to the possibility that if I was seen taking money for saying nice things about a product, my comments and choices and opinions would become, understandably, suspect.

The capacity of human beings to bore one another seems to be vastly greater than that of any other animal.

Many things difficult to design prove easy to performance.

I have made this letter longer than usual, only because I have not had the time to make it shorter.

Beauty without expression is boring.

A life is not important except in the impact it has on other lives.

I am the freest author in the world.

What makes us human, I think, is an ability to ask questions, a consequence of our sophisticated spoken language.

My daughter doesn’t even get my humor. She’s like, ‚Um, no. I don’t get it, Dad. Mmm, no, not that one, Dad.‘

I’ve never had writer’s block.

Kids who have an understanding of how and why their feelings are what they are are much more likely to talk to us about what’s happening, and they have better skills to work it out.

No art can be noble which is incapable of expressing thought, and no art is capable of expressing thought which does not change.

There are only 3 colors, 10 digits, and 7 notes; its what we do with them that’s important.

Without libraries what have we? We have no past and no future.

And all who told it added something new, and all who heard it, made enlargements too.