Whenever I'm sad I'm going to die, or so nervous I can't sleep, or in love with somebody I won't be seeing for a week, I slump down just so far and then I say: 'I'll go take a hot bath.

Please don’t expect me to always be good and kind and loving. There are times when I will be cold and thoughtless and hard to understand.

If I didn’t think, I’d be much happier.

If you expect nothing from anybody, you’re never disappointed.

I ride earth's burning carousel. Day in, day out.

What horrifies me most is the idea of being useless: well-educated, brilliantly promising, and fading out into an indifferent middle age.

Go out and do something. It isn’t your room that’s a prison, it’s yourself.

I desire the things that will destroy me in the end.

And by the way, everything in life is writable about if you have the outgoing guts to do it, and the imagination to improvise. The worst enemy to creativity is self-doubt.

If neurotic is wanting two mutually exclusive things at one and the same time, then I'm neurotic as hell.

Perhaps some day I'll crawl back home, beaten, defeated. But not as long as I can make stories out of my heartbreak, beauty out of sorrow.

It's not so much about what the morning brings

A woman needs a man, more than a man needs a woman. We can thank prostitutes for that.

Movies have heart. Have mind. Have power. Have ambition.

In America nobody says you have to keep the circumstances somebody else gives you.

We all may have prejudices, but we're not all part of a system that reinforces, reinvents and reaffirms itself every day of our lives, systemically.

I found that whatever interested me in life, I could pretty much pick up the phone, call somebody, and all of a sudden be in the middle of it.

Listening only to my instincts, I discovered superb things.

I think all of this—The Roots and DJing included—was meant to prepare me for The Tonight Show.

It 's really hard to impose democracy. It has to emerge naturally. You have to get out of the way and let it happen.

Of course the French are making very credible movies and it is still one of the greatest nations in terms of world cinema but the real problem is the decay in film criticism.