A diner having a row with a waiter in a swanky restaurant chills the blood in a way that a quarrel over a pizza order elsewhere would never do. Compassion is rarely the custom of the privileged.

We're terrible at realising what goes on in other people's heads because we are trapped inside our own.

Have your cake and eat it... there's no other reason to have a cake

I control the conditions so my testers become my testees.

The single most valuable human trait, the one quality every schoolchild and adult should be taught to nurture, is, quite simply, kindness.

To impress people as much as we would wish, we would first need to successfully adopt each of their value systems

...there is a fine line between wishing to produce child-like astonishment and treating people like infants.

The desire to impress is an efficient means of bringing out one’s least impressive qualities.

We forget our health and comfort and notice a pinching shoe. Much of living well is detaching from our boring stories of pain and shifting focus

Magic is a performance, and a performance should have an honesty, a relevance and a resonance if it is to be offered to spectators without insulting them.

I am often dishonest in my techniques ... I happily admit to cheating, it's all part of the game. I hope some of the fun for the viewer comes from not knowing what's real and what isn't

You are to me, what wind is to dry leaves. The reason for me to fall, the reason for me to fly.

God is to be worshipped as the one beloved, dearer than everything in this and next life.

Nothing that matters in this world happens unless leaders lead it.

By the late '80s, I was already giving up on rap music.

A drunkard clasp his teeth and not undo 'em, To suffer wet damnation to run through 'em.

I think there's always room to grow.

In the name of motherhood and fatherhood and education and good manners, we threaten and suffocate and bind and ensnare and bribe and trick children into wholesale emulation of our ways.

When I was young, you know, the first foreign editions that would come in of anything of mine, I'd sit there and look at them as these strange and wonderful artifacts.

I don't believe in journalists having 'responsibility.'