Intellectuals are people who go to study things other people do naturally.

In order to succeed, your desire for success should be greater than your fear of failure.

I don't know the key to success, but the key to failure is trying to please everybody.

Every closed eye is not sleeping, and every open eye is not seeing.

People can be more forgiving than you can imagine. But you have to forgive yourself. Let go of what's bitter and move on.

Nothing I've ever done has given me more joys and rewards than being a father to my children.

Fatherhood is pretending the present you love most is soap-on-a-rope.

I wasn't always black... there was this freckle, and it got bigger and bigger.

Raising children is an incredibly hard and risky business in which no cumulative wisdom is gained: each generation repeats the mistakes the previous one made.

It isn't a matter of black is beautiful as much as it is white is not all that's beautiful.

The main goal of the future is to stop violence. The world is addicted to it.

Every kind word or action has an equal reaction. What you put out comes back to you. Why not make it caring and joyful?

Most animals are like people-and like good people

While the Holy Spirit is hidden, He is never, ever absent

I am composed of contradictions, which is why poetry is a better form for me than philosophy

In the middle '50s, I had written that the point would come, inevitably, at which the relationship between the cause of conflict and political objectives would be lost.

You can take a handful of dollars, a good story, and people with passion and make a movie that will stand up against any $70 million movie.

I think that Ronald Reagan had it right, being against abortion except in certain limited, defined circumstances.

I moved to New York to do theater, and I got cast in a play that was funny, and then I was the funny guy. I did a movie that was funny, and then I was the funny guy.

I find it greatly disturbing that the Bush administration has used political and religious ideologies to influence national policy on science and medicine.

Between writing, traveling, speaking, preaching, and doing my best to be a good husband to my wife and my three kids, that's about as much as one man or at least this man can do.