When I was a little girl, I always dreamed of being a star. I didn’t really know what all that meant. I didn’t know.

From my childhood I had been intended for the clergy. This prospect hung like a dark cloud on my mind.

People say ‚I want to be rich‘. The question is, ‚Are you willing to do what it takes?‘

Whenever a man has cast a longing eye on offices, a rottenness begins in his conduct.

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

Life’s short. Anything could happen, and it usually does, so there is no point in sitting around thinking about all the ifs, ands and buts.

Why does the eye see a thing more clearly in dreams than the imagination when awake?

I identify myself as a hustler since I was a young kid.

Everybody wants to be somebody; nobody wants to grow.

I would rather make my name than inherit it.

Kings are not born: they are made by artificial hallucination.

When other little girls wanted to be ballet dancers I kind of wanted to be a vampire.

At one point, I didn’t care. Now I want as many people to hear my music as possible.

I started writing as a child. But I didn’t think of myself actually writing until I was in college. And I had gone to Africa as a sophomore or something – no, maybe junior – and wrote a book of poems. And that was my beginning. I published that book.

Happy is he who still loves something he loved in the nursery: He has not been broken in two by time; he is not two men, but one, and he has saved not only his soul but his life.

Everybody that I was in school with had an uncle or father in the law, and I started to realize that I was going to end up writing briefs for about ten years for these fellows who I thought I was smarter than. And I was kind of losing my feeling for that.

It’s so hard to know what to do when one wishes earnestly to do right.

It’s hard to speculate what tomorrow may bring.

The thing I want more than anything else? I want to have children. I used to feel for every child I had, I would adopt another.

The Lord can give, and the Lord can take away. I might be herding sheep next year.

When I got into this, I never thought about reviews. I never thought about what people would say about me, I was just a young guy who was excited to become a comedian and an actor, and I just wanted to get to do what I got to do.

It took me 40 years to write my first book. When I was a child, I was encouraged to go to school. I was not encouraged to follow the career of a writer because my parents thought that I was going to starve to death.

If the leader is filled with high ambition and if he pursues his aims with audacity and strength of will, he will reach them in spite of all obstacles.

I might just write a novel next. I don’t know!

Some people want to win races. Other people want to be President of the United States.

I was a smart kid, but I hated school.

Life is a gamble. You can get hurt, but people die in plane crashes, lose their arms and legs in car accidents; people die every day. Same with fighters: some die, some get hurt, some go on. You just don’t let yourself believe it will happen to you.

I had rather be first in a village than second at Rome.

We must think and act like a nation of a billion people and not like that of a million people. Dream, dream, dream!

Success isn’t supposed to happen, no matter how hard you work. There’s no guarantee you’re going to succeed. There’s nothing set in stone.

I was a strange, loud little kid who could sit at the piano and kill a Beethoven piece.

Part of the reason there’s an injunction to the truth, for example, is that if you’re in a circumstance of extreme uncertainty, your best weapon, let’s say, or your best tool or your best defense is the truth, because it keeps things simpler.

In such a porcelain life, one likes to be sure that all is well lest one stumble upon one’s hopes in a pile of broken crockery.

Moderation has been called a virtue to limit the ambition of great men, and to console undistinguished people for their want of fortune and their lack of merit.

I was mischievous. I wasn’t bad. I stole food so we could eat. My mother didn’t know. I used to tell her some man gave me $10 to sweep out the yard. I was like Robin Hood. I took from the rich and gave to the poor. Me.

From the time I was a kid, I always knew something was going to happen to me. Didn’t know exactly what.

Indecision may or may not be my problem.

I went through every emotion with tryna pursue what I’m doing, you know what I mean? And I think what’s gon‘ separate whoever’s gon go for something, that you ain’t gon‘ quit.

The most distressing thing that can happen to a prophet is to be proved wrong. The next most distressing thing is to be proved right.

I dream of painting and then I paint my dream.

To some extent I happily don’t know what I’m doing. I feel that it’s an artist’s responsibility to trust that.

I dream of a church that is a mother and shepherdess.

I always thought Johnny Carson was just brilliant, and I used to watch him and all the comics that would be on the show every night – and I’d dream about it being me.

I was the only kid who anybody I knew has ever seen actually walk into a lamppost with his eyes wide open. Everybody assumed that there must be something going on inside, because there sure as hell wasn’t anything going on on the outside!

I’ve dreamed about doing music since I was three or four years old.

I went to a public school through sixth grade, and being good at tests wasn’t cool.

I know that I always wanted things. I was always proud of my people, proud of my home, but I always wanted more. I think most people do.

What is this world that is hastening me toward I know not what, viewing me with contempt?

What’s coming will come and we’ll just have to meet it when it does.

What is imponderable in the world is greater than what we can handle.

I used to get the feeling, and sometimes I still get it, that sometimes I was fooling somebody; I don’t know who or what, maybe myself.

I didn’t know what a stockbroker was when I was eight, but I would just tell everybody that’s what I was going to be.

Never give up on what you really want to do. The person with big dreams is more powerful than the one with all the facts.

I had no ambition to be a writer because the books I read were too good, my standards were too high.

No one ever told me I was pretty when I was a little girl. All little girls should be told they’re pretty, even if they aren’t.

We want an Afghanistan that is shaped by the dreams of the great Afghan people, not by irrational fears and overreaching ambitions of others.

The joy and love that I get from playing football are unbelievable. It is such a feeling that I want to give everything that I have got. I just enjoy it, I am living a life that I never even dreamt of.

I learned to walk as a baby, and I haven’t had a lesson since.

It’s really annoying for me. That’s not what I’m playing for, to be the face of the NBA or to be this or that or to take LeBron’s throne or whatever.

It is not scientifically possible to accurately predict the outcome of an action. To suggest otherwise runs contrary to historical experience and the nature of war.

Dreams are the guiding words of the soul. Why should I henceforth not love my dreams and not make their riddling images into objects of my daily consideration?