There are times when you throw an interception and you’re beating yourself up.

Every successful businessman will have experienced set-backs and failures – they’re lying if they say they haven’t. Virgin has had some tremendously successful businesses and some that have not quite worked out. Virgin Cola springs to mind – the product wasn’t distinct enough from Coca-Cola.

My show ‚The Big House‘ was picked up; they flew me to New York. I’m about to step on stage to announce Kevin Hart’s ‚The Big House.‘ And a hand grabs my shoulder, ‚Kevin no, they just decided to cancel it.‘ It’s a serious smack-in-the-face business, and either you can take it, or you can’t.

If my world were to cave in tomorrow, I would look back on all the pleasures, excitements and worthwhilenesses I have been lucky enough to have had. Not the sadness, not my miscarriages or my father leaving home, but the joy of everything else. It will have been enough.

Everything in the world may be endured except continual prosperity.

We will all fail in life, but nobody has to be a failure. Failing at a thing doesn’t make you a failure. You are only a failure when you quit trying.

There comes a time when people get tired of being pushed out of the glittering sunlight of life’s July and left standing amid the piercing chill of an alpine November.

I had to come from something, come from a place that was negative and positive but the majority of it is a negative place.

I don’t believe in the school of hard knocks, although I’ve had them. All that stuff about whatever doesn’t kill you makes you stronger is so not true. Do you know what makes you stronger? When people treat you and your art with dignity.

When I was at school, I used to stay on a balcony singing and people would stand around listening.

About the time we can make the ends meet, somebody moves the ends.

During bad circumstances, which is the human inheritance, you must decide not to be reduced. You have your humanity, and you must not allow anything to reduce that. We are obliged to know we are global citizens. Disasters remind us we are world citizens, whether we like it or not.

I like someone who is a little crazy but coming from a good place. I think scars are sexy because it means you made a mistake that led to a mess.

I’ve learned that you shouldn’t go through life with a catcher’s mitt on both hands; you need to be able to throw something back.

Americans never quit.

When I was four, my mother insisted I get out of the car and find my own way home. Although I got lost, I did find my way home. It taught me the value of independence at an early age.

You can chain me, you can torture me, you can even destroy this body, but you will never imprison my mind.

Even the knowledge of my own fallibility cannot keep me from making mistakes. Only when I fall do I get up again.

I think it’s very important to cry in the shower and not in front of them. They need to know that everything’s going to be all right, even when you’re not sure it is.

I grew up in the east side of Detroit in an area where there was very little, except for a lot of scarcity, poverty and hunger. I never woke up saying, ‚I’m an orphan again today, isn’t this terrible? Poor me.‘

There is a need for aloneness, which I don’t think most people realise for an actor. It’s almost having certain kinds of secrets for yourself that you’ll let the whole world in on only for a moment, when you’re acting. But everybody is always tugging at you. They’d all like sort of a chunk of you.

Most of us aren’t defeated in one decisive battle. We are defeated one tiny, seemingly insignificant surrender at a time that chips away at who we should really be.

I get so excited when a song I wrote that’s very personal to me goes No. 1 and I look down and see people singing the words back to me.

How you played in yesterday’s game is all that counts.

It is a curious sensation: the sort of pain that goes mercifully beyond our powers of feeling. When your heart is broken, your boats are burned: nothing matters any more. It is the end of happiness and the beginning of peace.

A woman is like a tea bag – you can’t tell how strong she is until you put her in hot water.

Friendship is a plant of slow growth and must undergo and withstand the shocks of adversity before it is entitled to the appellation.

Violent men have not been known in history to die to a man. They die up to a point.

There is a lot of pressure put on me, but I don’t put a lot of pressure on myself. I feel if I play my game, it will take care of itself.

Early on in my life, I had a broken soul. I was abused by my father, abandoned by my mother and ended up in a destructive first marriage. By the time I was 23, I was broken in my soul. I didn’t know how to think right. I felt wrong about everything. But God stepped into my life, and I came out on the other side and didn’t even smell like smoke.

Sometimes God will deliver you from the fire, and other times God will make you fireproof.

I was born in a very poor family. I used to sell tea in a railway coach as a child. My mother used to wash utensils and do lowly household work in the houses of others to earn a livelihood. I have seen poverty very closely. I have lived in poverty. As a child, my entire childhood was steeped in poverty.

In difficult times, we’re not supposed to quit believing; we’re not supposed to quit growing.

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

Failure means a stripping away of the inessential.

Living in America and, of course, just being women in general, we’ve got more strength than we think we do.

The man who has done his level best… is a success, even though the world may write him down a failure.

It is in the admission of ignorance and the admission of uncertainty that there is a hope for the continuous motion of human beings in some direction that doesn’t get confined, permanently blocked, as it has so many times before in various periods in the history of man.

At the end of the day, I understand that life has road blocks, and life is like school – you’ll be tested; we gotta pass it.

Your life is like a play with several acts. Some of the characters who enter have short roles to play, others, much larger. Some are villains and others are good guys. But all of them are necessary; otherwise, they wouldn’t be in the play. Embrace them all, and move on to the next act.

War is a poor chisel to carve out tomorrow.

You may have to fight a battle more than once to win it.

To endure is the first thing that a child ought to learn, and that which he will have the most need to know.

When the oak is felled the whole forest echoes with it fall, but a hundred acorns are sown in silence by an unnoticed breeze.

I’m very picky; I’m never happy with anything. It’s so hard to give the record away and accept that you’re done.

We’re all capable of mistakes, but I do not care to enlighten you on the mistakes we may or may not have made.

Why, except as a means of livelihood, a man should desire to act on the stage when he has the whole world to act in, is not clear to me.

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.

Every adversity, every failure, every heartache carries with it the seed of an equal or greater benefit.

And I try to give the best bang for the buck. I love performing more than anything else.

I like the good life too much, I’m not good at going on stage night after night and on wet Wednesday afternoons.

I’ve had a lot of success; I’ve had failures, so I learn from the failure.

Do something everyday for no other reason than you would rather not do it, so that when the hour of dire need draws nigh, it may find you not unnerved and untrained to stand the test.

Music, in performance, is a type of sculpture. The air in the performance is sculpted into something.

I don’t think of all the misery but of the beauty that still remains.

Being president is like being a jackass in a hailstorm. There’s nothing to do but to stand there and take it.

I’ve had some dark nights of the soul, of course, but giving in to depression would be a sellout, a defeat.

We didn’t crumble after 9/11. We didn’t falter after the Boston Marathon. But we’re America. Americans will never, ever stand down. We endure. We overcome. We own the finish line.

I assess the power of a will by how much resistance, pain, torture it endures and knows how to turn to its advantage.

What we need to do is always lean into the future; when the world changes around you and when it changes against you – what used to be a tail wind is now a head wind – you have to lean into that and figure out what to do because complaining isn’t a strategy.

When life is too easy for us, we must beware or we may not be ready to meet the blows which sooner or later come to everyone, rich or poor.