It's no good telling somebody they're trying too hard. It's very much like ordering a child to go stand in a corner for a half hour and never once think about elephants.

My purpose is to entertain myself first and other people secondly.

Night and gin and music-the right setting for peeling off the thin clinging layers of bullshit and finding one's way down closer to the essential self.

You have to start knowing yourself so well that you begin to know other people. A piece of us is in every person we can ever meet.

If the cards are stacked against you, reshuffle the deck.

A nonreader is somebody standing there in a blindfold.

The only thing in the world worth a damn is the strange, touching, pathetic, awesome nobility of the individual human spirit.

Friendships, like marriages, are dependent on avoiding the unforgivable.

A man with a credit card is in hock to his own image of himself.

I want story, wit, music, wryness, color, and a sense of reality in what I read, and I try to get it in what I write.

Being an adult means accepting those situations where no action is possible.

That’s the thing with reality, he said, you can’t repeat it to order, you can’t correct it. Perhaps we should read more books.

My student days in PSG saw three Prime Ministers, two wars, taught us courage, resilience, leadership and optimism.

To maintain nice relation with the people is half of intelligence, nice questioning is half of knowledge, and nice domestic arrangements is half of the management of livelihood.

Cultivate humility it is the way of connectedness. Beware of false humility it leads to self-righteousness.

It's interesting how young poets think of death while old fogies think of girls.

One can read all one wants, and spend eternities in front of a blackboard with a tutor, but one is not going to learn to swim until one gets in the water.

I'm happy with the way everything turned out. Even the mistakes we've made I wouldn't take back because they ended up yielding something good.

The book Martin Luther King and the Montgomery Story, I read it when I was about 17-and-a-half or 18. It changed my life.

Everybody needs some inspiration, Everybody needs some motivation, mix it up with some imagination, and use your natural gifts.

Music at its essence is what gives us memories.