Creativity is not a solitary process. It happens within networks... when talented people get together, when idea systems and mentalities merge.

Almost every successful person begins with two beliefs: the future can be better than the present, and I have the power to make it so.

Much of life is about failure, whether we acknowledge it or not, and your destiny is profoundly shaped by how effectively you learn from and adapt to failure.

One of the things this world is finding is that emotion is the basis of reason. We really have to trust our emotions, which are much smarter than our reason in some ways.

The brain is not the mind. It is probably impossible to look at a map of brain activity and predict or even understand the emotions, reactions, hopes and desires of the mind.

Civility is the natural state for people who know how limited their own individual powers are and know, too, that they need the conversation.

It’s only useful to ask, what wisdom have you learned from your misjudgments that will help you going forward?

It is especially painful when narcissists suffer memory loss because they are losing parts of the person they love most.

Friendship allows you to see your own life but with a second sympathetic self.

Our emotions tell us what to value. They're like a little GPS system: Go that way. Don't go that way.

The daily activity that contributes most to happiness is having dinner with friends. The daily activity that detracts most from happiness is commuting. Eat more. Commute less.

When we are most scared is the time to summon our clearest concentration and move forward, not back.

He was changed, burned, branded, destroyed and rebuilt. And he loved it.

My entry into the environmental arena was through the issue that so dramatically - and destructively - demonstrates the link between science and social action: nuclear weapons.

Failure is relative. Life is adventure. Everything has beauty.

It is so much easier sometimes to sit down and be resigned than to rise up and be indignant.

I turned down the lead role in Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps, because that idiot Oliver Stone didn't think the character should play the alto sax.

As an actor, anything that you have to help get you into character is helpful.

Once you have your character sitting right there in your head, all you really need to do is wind them up, put them down, and simply write down what they do, say, or think.

Dictators ride to and fro upon tigers which they dare not dismount. And the tigers are getting hungry.