Fame will go by and, so long, I’ve had you, fame. If it goes by, I’ve always known it was fickle. So at least it’s something I experience, but that’s not where I live.

Could a greater miracle take place than for us to look through each other’s eyes for an instant?

The eyes of others our prisons; their thoughts our cages.

I don’t have people following me around, like bodyguards. I don’t know how people live like that. Maybe the young movie stars have to live like that, I don’t know. But it seems a little crazy to me. I don’t think you need all that stuff.

The intelligent man finds almost everything ridiculous, the sensible man hardly anything.

Necessity is not an established fact, but an interpretation.

Natural abilities are like natural plants, that need pruning by study; and studies themselves do give forth directions too much at large, except they be bounded in by experience.

Reality is only a Rorschach ink-blot, you know.

When someone is impatient and says, ‚I haven’t got all day,‘ I always wonder, How can that be? How can you not have all day?

Why is it that we rejoice at a birth and grieve at a funeral? It is because we are not the person involved.

Whether or not I like a piece of data has very little bearing on whether or not I am likely to accept it.

Well, Art is Art, isn’t it? Still, on the other hand, water is water. And east is east and west is west and if you take cranberries and stew them like applesauce they taste much more like prunes than rhubarb does. Now you tell me what you know.

When hiring somebody, I never ask to see a curriculum vitae. I feel that since I didn’t have one myself, it would be a bit presumptuous to ask to see anyone else’s.

It’s not morbid to talk about death. Most people don’t worry about death, they worry about a bad death.

It confuses me and disappoints me when somebody says, ‚What does he do? What does he do?‘ My records are some of the biggest anthems ever. What do you think, they magically just appear? Obama walked out to my record.

Truth has rough flavours if we bite it through.

To appreciate the noble is a gain which can never be torn from us.

I want to stand as close to the edge as I can without going over. Out on the edge you see all the kinds of things you can’t see from the center.

I’m convinced that no one can amount to a damn in the arts if he becomes sweetly reasonable, seeing all sides of a picture, forgiving all sins.

Experience praises the most happy the one who made the most people happy.

If I make music and people hate it, you know, whatever. I’ll die someday, and one day, they will too.

It’s cool to be recognised by your peers.

The person who has lived the most is not the one with the most years but the one with the richest experiences.

What most persons consider as virtue, after the age of 40 is simply a loss of energy.

All my life I’ve looked at words as though I were seeing them for the first time.

I had a lot of resistance, and not just to fame. I was always conscious of not changing.

The best advice comes from people who don’t give advice.

Jeb Bush, I appreciate you. You a leader. You a Bush.

I’ve watched a lot of people who became famous who completely change and I think it’s because they tend to believe all the hype that’s out there. I don’t think there’s that much hype about me.

I walk every day, and I look at the mountains and the fields and the small city, and I say: ‚Oh my God, what a blessing.‘ Then you realise it’s important to put it in a context beyond this woman, this man, this city, this country, this universe.

I have no use for people who throw their weight around as celebrities, or for those who fawn over you just because you are famous.

Fiction reveals truth that reality obscures.

Yesterday’s weirdness is tomorrow’s reason why.

I have to admit I’ve found myself doing the same things that a lot of other rock stars do or are forced to do. Which is not being able to respond to mail, not being able to keep up on current music, and I’m pretty much locked away a lot. The outside world is pretty foreign to me.

There is something curiously boring about somebody else’s happiness.

Some people regard private enterprise as a predatory tiger to be shot. Others look on it as a cow they can milk. Not enough people see it as a healthy horse, pulling a sturdy wagon.

When I started out, I didn’t have any desire to be an actress or to learn how to act. I just wanted to be famous.

Next to excellence is the appreciation of it.

It is impossible to experience one’s death objectively and still carry a tune.

Life would be tolerable but for its amusements.

We all want to be famous people, and the moment we want to be something we are no longer free.

He who is to be a good ruler must have first been ruled.

We do not hate as long as we still attach a lesser value, but only when we attach an equal or a greater value.

There is always another way to say the same thing that doesn’t look at all like the way you said it before. I don’t know what the reason for this is. I think it is somehow a representation of the simplicity of nature.

Do not be very upright in your dealings for you would see by going to the forest that straight trees are cut down while crooked ones are left standing.

Life is ten percent what happens to you and ninety percent how you respond to it.

Understand, when you eat meat, that something did die. You have an obligation to value it – not just the sirloin but also all those wonderful tough little bits.

I was always very curious as a young man about why older writers who I met seemed so indifferent to what was going on, whereas I, in my 20s, was reading everything. Everything seemed important. But they were only interested in the writers they admired when they were young, and I didn’t understand it then, but now, now I understand it.

Advice in old age is foolish; for what can be more absurd than to increase our provisions for the road the nearer we approach to our journey’s end.

If fame belonged to me, I could not escape her; if she did not, the longest day would pass me on the chase, and the approbation of my dog would forsake me then. My barefoot rank is better.

A sword never kills anybody; it is a tool in the killer’s hand.

The martyr cannot be dishonored. Every lash inflicted is a tongue of fame; every prison a more illustrious abode.

This is not a bad life.

The infinitely little have a pride infinitely great.

If I heard someone else singing like me, I would buy it in a heartbeat.

However my parents – both of whom came from impoverished backgrounds and neither of whom had been to college, took the view that my overactive imagination was an amusing quirk that would never pay a mortgage or secure a pension.

Is there anyone so wise as to learn by the experience of others?

I think we have to own the fears that we have of each other, and then, in some practical way, some daily way, figure out how to see people differently than the way we were brought up to.

At the outset, I want to say that the suggestion that the struggle in South Africa is under the influence of foreigners or communists is wholly incorrect. I have done whatever I did because of my experience in South Africa and my own proudly felt African background, and not because of what any outsider might have said.

You know, people talk about this being an uncertain time. You know, all time is uncertain. I mean, it was uncertain back in – in 2007, we just didn’t know it was uncertain. It was – uncertain on September 10th, 2001. It was uncertain on October 18th, 1987, you just didn’t know it.

One who is too insistent on his own views, finds few to agree with him.