I am very demanding of myself, but I am also very demanding of my players.

When something is important enough, you do it even if the odds are not in your favor.

Translation is the art of failure.

People are tired of simple things. They want to be challenged.

We are all parts of a single being, and it is not possible to hurt a part without hurting the whole.

To survive, you must tell stories.

There's something about music that it can move you in a way that nothing else can.

The creative process is a journey of self-discovery.

The best songs are the ones that come from the heart.

Curiosity is one of the forms of feminine bravery.

When dictatorship is a fact, revolution becomes a right.

To rise from error to truth is rare and beautiful.

To love another person is to see the face of God.

Be the change you wish to see in the world.

Our actions today will determine the world we leave for future generations.

We need to reconnect with the natural world to understand our place within it.

Chase your passion, not your pension.

You don't have to have everything figured out to move forward.

Success is not about winning, it's about growing and evolving.

Challenges are what make life interesting. Overcoming them is what makes life meaningful.

It's important to be nice to everyone. You never know who you might meet on the way up.

Stay humble, work hard, be kind.

Love is the only way to grasp another human being in the innermost core of his personality

Even when it is not fully attained, we become better by striving for a higher goal.

It is here that we encounter the central theme of existentialism: to live is to suffer, to survive is to find meaning in the suffering.

The point is not what we expect from life, but rather what life expects from us.

Then I grasped the meaning of the greatest secret that human poetry and human thought and belief have to impart: The salvation of man is through love and in love.

As for the concept of collective guilt, I personally think that it is totally unjustified to hold one person responsible for the behavior of another person or a collective of persons.

When a man cannot find meaning, he numbs himself with pleasure.

But there was no need to be ashamed of tears, for tears bore witness that a man had the greatest of courage, the courage to suffer.

I'm very comfortable being naked.

Belief creates the actual fact.

The main thing that you have to remember on this journey is just be nice to everyone and always smile.

Love is the only future God offers.

Laughter is sunshine, it chases winter from the human face.

The best part about being a bachelor is that you'll never get divorced.

You learn as much from those you don’t like as you do from those you do.

I'm someone who's always on the go and doing things.

Not being heard is no reason for silence.

Life is a theatre set in which there are but few practicable entrances.

Nobody loves the light like the blind man.

You who suffer because you love, love still more! To die of love, is to live by it.

A mother’s arms are made of tenderness and children sleep soundly in them.

The supreme happiness of life is the conviction that we are loved; loved for ourselves—say rather, loved in spite of ourselves.

He who opens a school door, closes a prison.

If you wish to understand what Revolution is, call it Progress; and if you wish to understand what Progress is, call it Tomorrow.

You can't manufacture the feeling of authenticity.

My music is about healing and hope.

I always had all of these childhood fantasies about wanting to invent things, like a spaceship or a time machine. And everyone's imagined what it would be like to go back in time and change things, to see what would happen if you had a different life. 'Back to the Future' fulfills all of those daydreams. It's the perfect movie.

Footage of young people getting shot. That bothers me. It hits a nerve.

I am an actor. I am an artist. I am a daughter. I am a sister. I am a partner. I have a past that some people may not agree with, but it does not define who I am.

I felt I could become a performer who stood out, who challenged the way things were done and make it more creative and also encourage men and women to not be afraid of their sexuality.

I like to work. I don't like to have lulls. I feel like it makes me lazy and uncreative, and that's when your ideas become stagnant.

I think the big evolutionary step for me is directing my own movies.

The school I was going to said they had no guidelines for a person with AIDS.

Entertainers, athletes, and stars started giving me support.

I received thousands of letters of support from all around the world, all because I wanted to go to school.

A joke isn't yours. It's used and you don't know where it's been.

Be happy. It really annoys negative people.

Being honest is what counts. To make the ordinary extraordinary is so much better than starting with the extraordinary.

In a game full of liars it turns out that I’m the truth. Some say that rap’s alive. It turns out that I’m the proof.

As we grow up, we realize it becomes less important to have a ton of friends and more important to have real ones.

I’m half-black, half-white, so I basically put it like this: I can fit in anywhere. That’s why I write so many stories from so many different perspectives, because I’ve seen so many.

If they don’t know your dreams, they can’t shoot them down.

I swear I walk with God, but the devil keeps following.

Time is short that’s what somebody told me.

You can’t reverse fame. You can lose all the money, but you’ll never lose people knowing you.

Anything's possible, you gotta dream like you never seen obstacles.

I think everybody has a bent, and the key is to follow that bent. So much human wastage comes from people who are doing things with their lives that they really aren't happy with.

Body language is more powerful than words.

Do this or you’ll burn in hell.

Everyone is entitled to their opinion, but if you believe in god, you're wrong.

You always hear ‘black Republican,’ but you never hear ‘white Democrat.’ We’ve got to get beyond the labels and stereotypes. Other people have hang-ups about it. I don’t.

The more I ponder some of the boneheaded decisions GOP candidates have made of late, I can’t bring myself to believe that they are serious about capturing more than about 8 percent of the black vote.

I embrace my blackness, just as I do my conservatism and my Christianity, but I don’t want to be defined or pigeonholed by any one of the many elements that make up my character.

There is a direct correlation between education, stable families and incarceration and crime.

I was taught to respect everyone for the simple reason that we're all God's children. I was taught, in the words of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.... to judge a man not by the color of his skin, but by the content of his character. And I was taught that character...is simply doing what's right when nobody's looking.

Everything I am I owe to my faith and secondly to parents who were old school.

You take a poor black child. Give him a good education, tell him he's somebody, that God didn't create junk when he created him, and that black child will create his own affirmative action.

Everyone tries to define this thing called Character. It's not hard. Character is doing what's right when nobody's looking.

When sailing if you miss a degree every day, eventually you'll be going in the exact opposite direction.

To have a second movie that you're proud of and that actually turned out the way you wanted, shot by shot, I realize I'm probably going to be able to do this for a little while for my living.

The original Spencer Tracy version of 'The Old Man and the Sea' was always terribly flawed because of the over-reliance on voice over, but it's still a beautiful movie.

If you’re not gone forever after you make your move, we are dead.

Make no mistake about it. You guys need to own the fact that we do not have the flag on our shoulders. You cannot go back to your normal life after tonight. You guys need to own the fact that what we’re about to do is criminal.

I had a caricature view of the guy in the beret with the big megaphone­­, but a movie director and writer was beyond my role of understanding.

Sometimes you can make friends, and sometimes you can take friends. Sometimes people want to be friends with you, and you gotta be like, 'Okay, I can deal with this person's personality and be their friend, but not necessarily do I have to change who I am. I'm not gonna change myself to be their friend.

I never write jokes, I just try to make myself laugh.

Man, you can come see me six or seven times in a row and you'll never see the same show twice, because I don't like to be robotic onstage. I like to perform for that particular audience.

I don't like to dabble in anything I don't do well. I don't talk politics.

I thought 'Pineapple Express' was hilarious.

You have to fail, man, but you cannot allow failure to stop you from doing what you must do. Failing is just as good as succeeding in a lot of ways. It's how you react to it all. You can react to success the wrong way and be a total failure. Or you can react to losing with your whole heart, learn from it, and be a huge success. In stand-up, I've learned to know when I'm burning it up or when I'm being so-so. That's experience. I learn every single time I'm on a stage.

I'm putting on a suit and tie when I go see The Great Gatsby.

I am the comedy version of ambidextrous. I'm working with my left and right hand. I'm the two-sided coin. I'm all of those metaphors you can think of. I'm the interracial couple. I'm BET and CBS.

When I started stand-up, the first thing I did was to take an improv class.

Believe it or not, I write on stage. I can't write anywhere else; I have to be in a moment. I also have to challenge myself to make something funny out of a premise. I never have my own jokes written. I have to change things as I go along, and I have to entertain myself.

I think comedy evolves constantly. I reinvent myself all the time. I always find a way to entertain myself because I truly believe you have to entertain yourself in order to relate it the right way to your audience.

White people think they can just do what the fuck they want to do all the time!

My wife is a vegetarian. When my wife is with me, I eat vegetarian. When she's not, I eat meat. I'm just being honest.