You say that you hope I will be recognized as the best novelist of my generation. I want you to know now and know completely that that would mean to me absolutely nothing.
If you're the person living closest to the parent who's going to need help, and you take on the whole role of primary caregiver, you can be pretty sure your sibling who lives farthest away is going to call you and say, 'You don't know what you're doing.' Because they're not on the spot, and they probably feel guilty.
I was the first businessman to say, 'You should give tax benefit to only small companies. You should say your profits are exempt to a limit of Rs. 50 crore or so, but beyond that, you should pay taxes.' I have been arguing with successive finance ministers on this.
All religions have based morality on obedience, that is to say, on voluntary slavery. That is why they have always been more pernicious than any political organization. For the latter makes use of violence, the former - of the corruption of the will.
The trouble when you die is that everyone says you were nice. I would like to be thought of as genuinely nice. I would like there to be people who can honestly say, 'Len! Oh yeah, there was more good than bad in him.'
You have to free your mind to do things you wouldn't think of doing. Don't ever say no.
I always start with characters rather than with a plot, which many critics would say is very obvious from the lack of plot in my films - although I think they do have plots - but the plot is not of primary importance to me, the characters are.
Kip Keino, Moses Tanui, Paul Tergat, they all come from my tribe. Some say it is the food we eat that makes us strong, the way we live. In the history of our people we wear no clothes and we are used to drinking the blood of animals.
Starbucks says they are going to start putting religious quotes on cups. The very first one will say, 'Jesus! This cup is expensive!'
Politics has been a roller coaster, but I'll never look back and say, 'Why did I do it?' In fact, if my son decided to join politics tomorrow, he has my full and unconditional support.
Bruce Lee was just so lightning-fast. People try to emulate him in whatever way they can, but to try and do what he was doing... you're just inspired by it; you're not trying to say, 'Look, I can do that.' No one can do what he did.
No, but women are saying, and they say, are you crazy? But because they've had children since they were 20 years old. I haven't. So I had a child when I was 43, and now he's really out with his friends.
Sometimes you don't have to say anything. Silence speaks it all.
Sometimes cameras and television are good to people and sometimes they aren't. I don't know if its the way you say it, or how you look.
It really was hand-to-mouth and you can say, 'Poor little me, how dreadful, what a deprived childhood', but I didn't feel that way at all. It's all about the attitude at home.
Some people say I'm conscious, some say I'm a gangsta rapper - it's just me doing me. I'm stomping in my own lane. I'm doing what I do.
We exaggerate misfortune and happiness alike. We are never as bad off or as happy as we say we are.
Whether you do stand-up comedy or write a story, you have a duty to deliver. As a comedian, you walk out on stage, and you have a minute to hook them, or they'll start booing. As a writer, it's very similar. A reader doesn't have time to say, 'I'll give him 50 pages, as it's not very good yet, but I hope it'll get better.'
I know that my works are a credit to this nation and I dare say they will endure longer than the McCarran Act.
A good producer brings out the best in the artist he's working with. You shouldn't be able to listen to something and say, 'So-and-so produced this album.'
The media tends to report rumors, speculations, and projections as facts... How does the media do this? By quoting some 'expert'... you can always find some expert who will say something hopelessly hopeless about anything.
If you decide to move to L.A. like, 'I'm just gonna see if it works, and if nothing works I'm gonna go back in a year, two years' - very, very few people with that attitude are successful. You need to make a commitment to this and say, 'This is who I am, and this is what I do.'
People make mistakes - they say things they shouldn't have or didn't necessarily mean. But I strongly believe in consequences. If there are none, someone might feel like they've gotten away with something, or that what they said couldn't have been that bad.
Painting is a language which cannot be replaced by another language. I don't know what to say about what I paint, really.
I'm not trying to say that it never hurt or that I never felt its sting, but I can honestly say that I never blamed anybody for racism. I have considered it more of a manifestation of humanity's problem rather than my personal problem.
What this power is I cannot say; all I know is that it exists and it becomes available only when a man is in that state of mind in which he knows exactly what he wants and is fully determined not to quit until he finds it.
It is indefensible that IRS Commissioner Koskinen has not been held accountable for failing to meet his legal obligations. This is exactly what the American people are tired of when they say that our government is on the wrong track.
Right now I'd say my favorite fashion designer is Zac Posen.
People say I'm not world level, but I haven't fought at that class yet, so you can't say that until I have.
It is my ambition to say in ten sentences what others say in a whole book.
I sometimes feel that if your book sells more than 20 years, then there's something in it that you can say, gee, I did something that endures, that's timeless.
Rome should sometimes intervene and say this or that is not in conformity with the Catholic faith. Theologians should understand that. Some theologians go too far, for example, reducing the Catholic faith to a universal philosophy.
The difference between us and them, between you and success, is not that you never fail, but it's how you recover from those failures - is that you keep getting up time and time again. You figure out what you did wrong, and then you make it right. I say that to my kids every day.
I say at this point, for different reasons, Bush and Hussein are both very threatening to world peace and to deny that is to be incredibly naive.
Some memorizers arbitrarily associate each playing card with a familiar person or object, so that the king of clubs is represented by, say, Tony Danza. The grand masters associate each card with a person, an action, or an object so that every group of three cards can be converted into a sentence.
When I say something's going to happen, it's going to happen.
