We don't analyze our lyrics.

There's fifty bands doing my riffs for ever and ever.

Until these college students came into town, we were all very poor and didn't have money to do anything.

And there was no money in Chicago for a band.

And we used to do a lot of drugs and get very drunk on very cheap wine.

We never really wanted to play in California.

We don't care about our audiences that much. We just go out and play.

They're there because, for some reason, they have the notion that they're supposed to be there.

We were just a bunch of high school kids who got into the Ramones together.

Our very first gig in Melbourne was a confrontation.

We don't analyze our lyrics.

We played a gig and we had a song that was offensive to people of the Jewish persuasion, and we led off with it, and they were offended by it, and that was that.

It is inconceivable to me that a million or three million or half a million human beings will think and feel precisely the same way on any single subject.

Mankind is a great an immense family. This is proved by what we feel in our hearts at Christmas.

The work that must be done for each woman to reconnect with her psyche and to give herself a chance to live her own life is essentially the same. The realization of the equality of all races, the equality of all beings is essential.

Melancholy is an escape not from reality, but unreality of the world.

An artist who conforms to conventional ideas is nothing but a mere charlatan.

I find still photographs make me quite self-conscious.

I try to keep things as varied as possible in my career, and after playing something as fun and over the top as Maryann on 'True Blood,' I wanted to find something antithetical to that.

Grandmasters decline with age. That's a given. There is nothing special about the age of 40, but age eventually takes its toll. That much is clear. Beyond that, it's about how long you can put off the effects and compensate for them. Mistakes will crop in, but you try to compensate for them with experience and hard work.

Get knowledge of the spine for this is the requisite for many diseases.

Our favorite holding period is forever.

Frankly speaking, I decided to become a businessman at the moment when I understood that it is possible, because I grew up in a country where it was not possible. There existed even a special article in the penal code of the Soviet Union which punished entrepreneurial activity.

Whatever you do in life, surround yourself with smart people who'll argue with you.

Wedding rings need to be sparkly to remind us not to have sex with other people.

I am fairly concise when I work and I work quickly because I think work is done better in a high gear than done our in a gear when everyone's exhausted. Get focused, do it!

Forget the past.

Your goals are the road maps that guide you and show you what is possible for your life.

I never read detective novels. I started out in graduate school writing a more serious book. Right around that time I read 'The Day of the Jackal' and 'The Exorcist'. I hadn't read a lot of commercial fiction, and I liked them.

Life is not measured by the number of breaths we take, but by the moments that take our breath away.

I can't know entirely what's at stake beforehand; you find out as you go. I love to take a poem, for instance, that starts with something seemingly frivolous or inconsequential and then grows in gravity until by the end it's something very serious.

The reward of great men is that, long after they have died, one is not quite sure that they are dead.

At 10 A.M. on the Friday after the election in 2010, David Cameron's team met in his room at the Westminster Bridge Park Plaza Hotel. Cameron was clear that, unable to form a majority government, they had to begin talks with the Lib Dems about forming a coalition. But in a rare example of strategic discord, George Osborne disagreed.

That's part of the character of Shanghainese people. They're good negotiators, they're very persistent, and you grow up in an atmosphere like that - very competitive. That becomes part of your personality: Shanghai personality becomes part of yours. Just like New Yorkers - they're often like that.

Of all the Jedis I saw in the film, Yoda's the only one I like.

As an actor, all you have is what you know and what you see in other people. The more you know, and the more you've experienced, the more you're able to communicate to other people.