With my childhood, it’s a wonder I’m not psychotic. I was the little Jewish boy in the non-Jewish neighborhood. It was a little like being the first Negro enrolled in the all-white school. I grew up in libraries and among books, without friends.

Children, I mean, think of your own childhood, how important the bedtime story was. How important these imaginary experiences were for you. They helped shape reality, and I think human beings wouldn’t be human without narrative fiction.

Books are the treasured wealth of the world and the fit inheritance of generations and nations.

The proper study of mankind is books.

The human animal cannot be trusted for anything good except en masse. The combined thought and action of the whole people of any race, creed or nationality, will always point in the right direction.

Everyone does things differently on offense. Everyone’s goal is to score points.

I have never felt that the one thing that I am ‚known for‘ is what I am.

I don’t look at myself as a commodity, but I’m sure a lot of people have.

It is time for parents to teach young people early on that in diversity there is beauty and there is strength.

I know that some books and some writers, you can pretty much draw a square around it and say, ‚Nobody under 40,‘ or ‚Nobody under 25.‘ With my books, it always has been, and continues to be, spread right across the board, and I think the operative term is ‚reader.‘

I think kids are natural actors. You watch most kids; if they don’t have a toy, they’ll pick up a stick and make a toy out of it. Kids will daydream all the time.

I really thought I was on the way out. My husband Blake saved my life. Often I don’t know what I do, then the next day the memory returns. And then I am engulfed in shame.

I had not expected ‚A Brief History of Time‘ to be a best seller.

When I was five, I think, that’s when I started wanting to be an actress. I loved to play. I didn’t like the world around me because it was kind of grim, but I loved to play house. It was like you could make your own boundaries.

Everything is possible, from angels to demons to economists and politicians.

Boredom, anger, sadness, or fear are not ‚yours,‘ not personal. They are conditions of the human mind. They come and go. Nothing that comes and goes is you.

Fear keeps us focused on the past or worried about the future. If we can acknowledge our fear, we can realize that right now we are okay. Right now, today, we are still alive, and our bodies are working marvelously. Our eyes can still see the beautiful sky. Our ears can still hear the voices of our loved ones.

We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful what we pretend to be.

You know how you either grow up in a Michael Jackson house or a Prince house? For me it was Michael Jackson. I could never decide whether I wanted to be Michael Jackson or marry him.

First, I’m trying to prove to myself that I’m a person. Then maybe I’ll convince myself that I’m an actress.

What’s in a name? That which we call a rose by any other name would smell as sweet.

The fact is: It’s true what they say about the United States. It is a land of opportunity. It is too various to get bored with it.

We can have no ’50-50′ allegiance in this country. Either a man is an American and nothing else, or he is not an American at all.

I don’t think I ever thought of myself as Superman. But there were people who thought of me that way, and maybe I believed them a little.

Childhood is the sleep of reason.

Hatred is settled anger.

If I had no sense of humor, I would long ago have committed suicide.

We have a tendency to condemn people who are different from us, to define their sins as paramount and our own sinfulness as being insignificant.

Give yourself a gift of five minutes of contemplation in awe of everything you see around you. Go outside and turn your attention to the many miracles around you. This five-minute-a-day regimen of appreciation and gratitude will help you to focus your life in awe.

I never played with anything like toys.

We become not a melting pot but a beautiful mosaic. Different people, different beliefs, different yearnings, different hopes, different dreams.

It is incontestable and deplorable that Negroes have committed crimes; but they are derivative crimes. They are born of the greater crimes of the white society.

As a shame researcher, I know that the very best thing to do in the midst of a shame attack is totally counterintuitive: Practice courage and reach out!

I’d go to, like, six different schools in one year. We were on welfare, and my mom never ever worked.

What is needed, rather than running away or controlling or suppressing or any other resistance, is understanding fear; that means, watch it, learn about it, come directly into contact with it. We are to learn about fear, not how to escape from it.

I don’t carry the burden of the past or the madness of the future. I live in the present.

For me, there have been times when an action movie, even a ‚Tomb Raider,‘ has helped me get out of myself and be physical again. It’s like therapy.

I always knew from that moment, from the time I found myself at home in that little segregated library in the South, all the way up until I walked up the steps of the New York City library, I always felt, in any town, if I can get to a library, I’ll be OK. It really helped me as a child, and that never left me.

I guess it’s flattering that everyone believed I was those characters, but it also is dehumanizing.

In the egoic state, your sense of self, your identity, is derived from your thinking mind – in other words, what your mind tells you about yourself: the storyline of you, the memories, the expectations, all the thoughts that go through your head continuously and the emotions that reflect those thoughts. All those things make up your sense of self.

What we become depends on what we read after all of the professors have finished with us. The greatest university of all is a collection of books.

When you pick up a book, everyone knows it’s imaginary. You don’t have to pretend it’s not a book. We don’t have to pretend that people don’t write books. That omniscient third-person narration isn’t the only way to do it. Once you’re writing in the first person, then the narrator is a writer.

Cycling can be lonely, but in a good way. It gives you a moment to breathe and think, and get away from what you’re working on.

As a kid, I’d go into the bathroom when I was having a tantrum. I’d be in the bathroom crying, studying myself in the mirror. I was preparing for future roles.

There is but an inch of difference between a cushioned chamber and a padded cell.

What the Pope thinks of being gay does not matter to the world. It matters to the people who like the Pope and follow the Pope… It is not a reflection of all religious people.

I haven’t changed at all. I’m the same as when I was 11.

India has 2,000,000 gods and worships them all. In religion, all other countries are paupers; India is the only millionaire.

I grew up as this very carefree, happy kid then things turned darker for me. Maybe it was because I saw that the world wasn’t as happy a place as I had hoped it would be for me.

I didn’t know any gay people in my childhood.

A toddling little girl is a centre of common feeling which makes the most dissimilar people understand each other.

We need to try to unite audiences, unite countries, join musical tastes, unite people.

I never had that feeling that I had to carry the weight of somebody’s ignorance around with me. And that was true for racists who wanted to use the ‚n‘ word when talking about me or about my people, or the stupidity of people who really wanted to belittle other folks because they weren’t pretty or they weren’t rich or they weren’t clever.

All that mankind has done, thought or been: it is lying as in magic preservation in the pages of books.

If you’re serious, you really understand that it’s important that you laugh as much as possible and admit that you’re the funniest person you ever met. You have to laugh. Admit that you’re funny. Otherwise, you die in solemnity.

When the negative thoughts come – and they will; they come to all of us – it’s not enough to just not dwell on it… You’ve got to replace it with a positive thought.

I wouldn’t say I have a lack of fear. In fact, I’d like my fear emotion to be less because it’s very distracting and fries my nervous system.

Since I was 16, I’ve felt a black cloud hangs over me. Since then, I have taken pills for depression.

I love you when you bow in your mosque, kneel in your temple, pray in your church. For you and I are sons of one religion, and it is the spirit.

When I was 8 years old I became a mute and was a mute until I was 13, and I thought of my whole body as an ear, so I can go into a crowd and sit still and absorb all sound. That talent or ability has lasted and served me until today.

I don’t think about the end game. I’ve got lots to occupy my mind. It’s the rage that keeps me going.