You need to transform all the ‘stuff’ you attract and accumulate into a clear inventory of meaningful actions, projects, and usable information.

Your mind is for having ideas, not for holding them.

Pretend your brain is a white board. Is it covered with to-do lists and “DO NOT ERASE”? Is there space for drawing and combining ideas?

If we don’t appropriately manage the ‘open loops’ in our life, our attention will get pulled.

Overwhelm comes from not clarifying what your intended outcome is, not deciding what the very next action is, and not reminding yourself of your intended outcome and action.

Getting things done requires defining what “done” means and what “doing” looks like.

Mastering your workflow involves capturing what has your attention, clarifying what it means, putting it where it belongs, reviewing it frequently and engaging with it.

If an action will take less than two minutes, it should be done at the moment it is defined.

Anxiety and guilt don’t come from having too much to do; it comes from breaking agreements with yourself.

When the policy is controversial, you have to go out and defend it.

I think Beyonce always looks great.

There is no surprise more magical than the surprise of being loved It is Gods finger on mans shoulder.

I love the whole lingerie outfit - you know, thigh-high tights and garters.

You campaign in poetry. You govern in prose.

If you're guilty of something, you can focus on that, but if something terrible happens, and you can't imagine how you could have changed it, that's very difficult for the mind. In some ways, it's more difficult not to be at fault because it's a subtler thing.

I knew everything and received everything. But real happiness, is giving.

I love France. France is a nice place.

We don't get a chance to do that many things, and every one should be really excellent. Because this is our life. Life is brief, and then you die, you know? So this is what we've chosen to do with our life.

There is nothing more important in the world than loving yourself.

Kids in Alaska don't know they're growing up on the Last Frontier. It's just what they see on the license plates, and it's something tourists like to say a lot because they've never been around so many mountains and moose before.

What makes earth feel like hell is our expectation that it should feel like heaven.

Contemplation means rest suspension of activity withdrawal into the mysterious interior solitude in which the soul is absorbed in the immense and fruitful silence of God and learns something of the secret of His perfections less by seeing than by fruitive love.

You don't have to be great to start, but you have to start to be great.

I thought, after the Pulitzer, at least nothing will surprise me quite that much in my life. And another one happened. It was quite amazing.

I'm very committed to and interested in CNN's journalism and our magazines and our movie studio, not just HBO, where I grew up. But I do have a fondness for subscription television.

The corporate world has the resources to improve the world. It's where people live and work.

If we all went to Google right now, or went to Yelp right now, we'd all get the same results, and that seems really, really broken to me. Foursquare should understand the neighborhoods I've spent a lot of time in, and the restaurants that I went to once but never went back to.

I'd like to believe that tomorrow is another challenge for me. I'm sure there is lots more for me to do, because there is lots and lots of stuff still to be explored.

The most beautiful people Ive known are those who have known trials have known struggles have known loss and have found their way out of the depths.

I never try and play a bad guy to be bad and to be brutal and to be nasty and vicious, because I think you're going to be very cliche there. You know, you've got to find the truth in that character and what he believes in. It just happens that, you know, he's wrong.

Parenthood is a very, very intense experience.

If you are not criticized, you may not be doing much.

The most successful cultural diplomacy strategy integrates people-to-people or arts/culture/media-to-people interactions into the basic business of diplomacy. The programs in Afghanistan, Egypt, and Iran all contribute to core goals of U.S. policy in those countries.