Finally you begin to make your mistakes on the highest level-let's say the upper slopes of slippery Parnassus-and it's at that point you need coaching.

Everyone is necessarily the hero of his own life story.

Like an ox-cart driver in monsoon season or the skipper of a grounded ship, one must sometimes go forward by going back.

In art as in lovemaking, heartfelt ineptitude has its appeal and so does heartless skill, but what you want is passionate virtuosity.

More history is made by secret handshakes than by battles, bills and proclamations.

The story of your life is not your life; it's your story.

Is man a savage at heart, skinned o'er with fragile Manners? Or is savagery but a faint taint in the natural man's gentility, which erupts now and again like pimples on an angel's arse?

Those rituals of getting ready to write produce a kind of trance state.

Every artist joins a conversation that's been going on for generations, even millennia, before he or she joins the scene.

History - an account, mostly false, of events, mostly unimportant

Nothing is loathsomer than the self-loathing of a self one loathes.

[On marriage and permanent attach

I will sit in the car on the way to a meeting and just smile. I really mean that. It helps you get through life. If you have nothing to say, smile. Look up at the sky and smile. Just be grateful.

The rarest of all things in American life is charm. We spend billions every year manufacturing fake charm that goes under the heading of public relations. Without it, America would be grim indeed.

She started drinkin' we weren't thinkin' too straight, she was doing eighty slammed on the brakes. Got so hot we had to pull to the side, did some shakin' 'til the middle of the night.

Statistics don't lie. It's the people who make up the statistics that lie.

When you have a World Champion in your smartphone, the myth of the superior brainpower of human chess champions has lost its power.

I am just taking the top fights out there for me. People will get bored seeing me every day knock someone out.

There would be no hair growing business today had I not started it.

I question what emotion Manilow touches. People are entertained by him. But are they emotionally moved? I don't believe anything that Barry Manilow sings.

I need a focus group like I need a hole in my head.