The only true happiness comes from squandering ourselves for a purpose.

He played the king as if afraid someone else would play the ace.

A good conversationalist is not one who remembers what was said, but says what someone wants to remember.

Nowhere are prejudices more mistaken for truth, passion for reason and invective for documentation than in politics.

No man, with a man's heart in him gets far on his way without some bitter, soul-searching disappointment. Happy is he who is brave enough to push on to another stage of the journey.

Charm is a glow within a woman which casts a most becoming light on others.

Reasoning with a child is fine, if you can reach the child's reason without destroying your own.

It is in the hard, hard rockpile labor of seeking to win, hold, or deserve a reader's interest that the pleasant agony of writing again comes in.

So often we rob tomorrow's memories by today's economies.

The purpose of writing is to hold a mirror to nature, but too much today is written from small mirrors in vanity cases.

Even when the facts are available, most people seem to prefer the legend, and refuse to believe the truth when it in any way dislodges the myth.

Before one can learn truth, one must unlearn lies.

Love your kids and just be there for them. You don’t have to eyeball their every moment or to orchestrate all their comings and goings. They know this. They know that’s too much.

When happiness is happening it feels as if nothing else happened before it, it is a sensation that happens only in the present tense.

Death without the possibility of ever changing the world is the same as a life that never was.

To proclaim himself an agnostic, while to some it might appear more respectable and cautious, would be to say in effect that he hadn't decided what to believe.

Every character I play has to be the hero of his own story, the way we're all heroes of our own lives.

We celebrities are desperate pigs.

With all my heart I beseech and beg my two hundred million female compatriots to assume their responsibility as citizens. Arise! Arise! Chinese women, arise!

You get a taste here in New Orleans that you don't get anywhere else in the country.

I write for myself; I release the albums to connect with everyone else.