some people are so bitter to them you must be kindest

what drives you crazy what keeps you up at night

you must understand the difference between want and need you may want that boy but you certainly don't need him

you must enter a relationship with yourself before anyone else

do not look for healing at the feet of those who broke you

if you were born with the weakness to fall you were born with the strength to rise

it takes grace to remain kind in cruel situations

to be soft is to be powerful

accept yourself as you were designed

other women's bodies are not our battlegrounds

i have what i have and i am happy i've lost what i've lost and i am still happy

if the hurt comes so will the happiness

how you love yourself is how you teach others to love you

you are your own soul mate

if you are not enough for yourself you will never be enough for someone else

you must want to spend the rest of your life with yourself first

I don't know what I am. I guess you can call me a character actor in the sense that I'll never be an ingenue. You know, that's over. My shot was missed. I take a normal person and make them more of a character. I don't know what that would be called.

Sometimes I do feel like I write the same story again and again. And for me, I am always looking for a place with a kind of redemption.

Awards are merely the badges of mediocrity.

I think women are usually a little bit nervous about wearing white denim.

I don't want to have anyone else as Prime Minister other than David Cameron, and if people spend their time thinking about some of this stuff, then they are getting in the way of two things: one, a fair, open, fact-based referendum debate; and two, the Conservative government continuing afterwards in a stable and secure fashion.

When you ask people, 'What's the opposite of fragile?,' they tend to say robust, resilient, adaptable, solid, strong. That's not it. The opposite of fragile is something that gains from disorder.

I'm one of the culprits who keeps turning stuff around, shaking up original tunes and trying to stand the canon on its ear. But sometimes, you just need to sing the song.

Doing interviews about my films really bothers me sometimes, because I have to speak directly and clearly about things I've intended to keep ambiguous, and in a way, I feel like I'm betraying my film.

Opportunities for sharing the gospel are everywhere.

Discovering L.A., in particular in the early '80s, was pretty spectacular; it was fun and carefree, and there was not nearly as much traffic as exists today. It was very much the last gasps of the Beach Boys' ideal view of L.A.: sun, the beach, cars, blondes, etc.

The sublime moment seems to be only a product of allowing yourself to get through, to get to a lot of stuff in your life, write about a lot of stuff and not edit yourself. That is a great lesson to learn for anybody that writes or creates in anyway, to be able to make something without being good or bad.

The deployment of geolocating tags attached to ordinary garbage could paint a surprising picture of the waste management system, as trash is shipped throughout the country in a maze-like disposal process - as we saw in Seattle with our own Trash Track project.

Give the peasants neither life nor death.

Pure love makes you feel as light as a flower. You won't feel any heaviness or burden. Ego creates the burden.

I still believe that if your aim is to change the world journalism is a more immediate short term weapon.

If aliens visit us, the outcome would be much as when Columbus landed in America, which didn't turn out well for the Native Americans.

A dream without ambition is like a car without gas... you're not going anywhere.

I've always felt like we're all human beings and we're all basically given the tools to make whatever choices we want to make. How we treat other people. How we treat ourselves. Just the whole philosophy of that and the philosophical logic of that is that we're all capable of great acts of evil, and we're all capable of great acts of good.

When a man repeats a promise again and again he means to fail you.

I love the idea of a very simple 8-bit video game character struggling with the complex question: 'isn't there more to life than the role I've been assigned?'

Long before the idea of a writer's conference was a glimmer in anyone's eye, writers learned by reading the work of their predecessors. They studied meter with Ovid, plot construction with Homer, comedy with Aristophanes; they honed their prose style by absorbing the lucid sentences of Montaigne and Samuel Johnson.

I decided that if the police couldn't catch the gangsters, I'd create a fellow who could.

I was born to be married. I just feel comfortable there. I love the idea of being partnered for ever. I love my girlfriend, we've been best friends since I was 18. There's not a thing we haven't been through except for marriage... We've had talks about what we would name our kids since we were in our 20s.

It's hard sometimes to take a step back and realize what's happened because you're always trying to move forward. You're always looking at the next palette.