Tell the truth - or at least, don't lie.

Stand up straight with your shoulders back.

Treat yourself like someone you are responsible for helping.

Make friends with people who want the best for you.

Compare yourself to who you were yesterday, not to who someone else is today.

Set your house in perfect order before you criticize the world.

Pursue what is meaningful not what is expedient.

Assume that the person you are listening to might know something you don't.

There are no sacred and unsacred places; there are only sacred and desecrated places. My belief is that the world and our life in it are conditional gifts.

Fast food is the one thing everyone can relate to. It's depressing, but also interesting, that people desire to eat the same sandwich in every single city in the world. But the biggest bummer is when you see a Subway in Berlin. Just devastating.

Despair makes victims sometimes victors.

Equality and freedom are not luxuries to lightly cast aside. Without them order cannot long endure before approaching depths beyond imagining.

It's amazing what happens to your body as you get a little older.

I do remember reading the script of 'The Nightmare Fair' and looking forward to doing it.

I seem to watch less and less television. The best thing in 'Downton Abbey' is Penelope Wilton. She is always worth the watch.

It is not true that drink changes a man's character. It may reveal it more clearly.

Mostly, I don't write overtly personal stuff.

You cant buy love but you can buy handmade and thats kind of the same thing.

Nearly all of the major kinds of life, divisions of life, phyla of animals, occur in the sea. Only about half of them can make it to land or freshwater.

We've got to take some drastic steps in this country. We can't keep spending and spending.

Film is fragmented and gets into lots of other people's hands. There are a lot of pleasures that theatre gives me. You get to perform uninterrupted.

Being the Children's Laureate has been educational, sometimes hectic, but most of all, great fun.

I know that some things are beyond our control, some illnesses are beyond our control, we get sick, we don't know why. But let's pledge to do whatever we can to avoid those high medical bills.

If God is real, and I believe he is, then he is outside of nature. He is, therefore, not limited by the laws of nature in the way that we are.

The goal was to work enough to pay my bills and stop going through the couch looking for change. Going way beyond that isn't something I really factored in.

Even when I was in school shows, in elementary school doing plays, I'd always go off book and start improvising.

Philosophy leads to death, sociology leads to suicide.

Drivers don't always see the (flashing) lights. You can't get tunnel vision. You've got to look everywhere, even when your adrenaline is going.

The love that lasts the longest is the love that can never be.

I think what turned me off of Christianity as a kid, and what I think turns other people off, is the thought that you have to sacrifice being cool to believe in God.

Institutionalized discrimination is bad for people and for societies. Widespread discrimination is also bad for economies. There is clear evidence that when societies enact laws that prevent productive people from fully participating in the workforce, economies suffer.

In this business, there is an insane amount of pressure, spoken and unspoken, to be thin. If you look at some of the television shows, eating disorders become like a competitive thing.