“I found I wasn’t asking good enough questions because I assumed I knew something.”

When does she do all this thinking? We’re together all the time but she thinks deeply about things and with feeling and she can remember the facts. We’ve been married 48 years.

A taste; a painful longing. but the net is always too porous, and we are left with the sweet frustration of almost knowing, which is teasingly pleasurable.

Here’s my Golden Rule for a tarnished age: Be fair with others, but keep after them until they’re fair with you.

If you know what you’re looking for, that’s all you’ll get – what’s previously known. But when you’re open to what’s possible, you get something new – that’s creativity.

I have thought about punching people out. Sometimes, I’ve thought, ‘Why don’t I just act on that impulse?’ But then, I’ve never hit anybody in anger. Hey! I’ve never hit anybody for fun.

I can sing in tune now, but I have to work really hard on it to make sure that I don’t exercise one of my great talents, which is the ability to sing in three keys at the same time.

I had never really wanted to be famous. Everyone is supposed to want to be rich and famous, but as a boy I never knew what rich was, and the first view I had of famous made me leery.

When people are laughing, they’re generally not killing one another.

And I want to warn everyone in the press and all the voters out there: if you demand expressions of religious faith from politicians, you are just begging to be lied to.

You can’t get there by bus, only by hard work and risk and by not quite knowing what you’re doing. What you’ll discover will be wonderful. What you’ll discover will be yourself.

It makes it fun. When an actor plays a character, you want what that character wants. Otherwise it doesn’t look authentic. So I really want to defeat Jimmy – I mean Jimmy as the character.

People who laugh together generally don’t kill each other.

I’ve played a murderer, so certainly I think I can play a Republican.

I was a child, and my mother was psychotic. She loved me, but I didn’t really feel I had a mother. And when you live with somebody who is paranoid and thinks you’re trying to kill them all the time, you tend to feel a little betrayed.

Someone wrote a Wikipedia entry about me, identifying me as an atheist because I’d said in a book I wrote that I wasn’t a believer.

One day, though, I realized I was no longer a believer, and realizing that, I couldn’t go back.

National Action Network, the group I founded, has affiliates or chapters in over 40 cities around the country.

I found out how temperamental I am, yes. And that sometimes that can be kind of off-putting.

I found they took a lot out of you and they were exhausting for me in a lot of ways.

I have found people on both sides of the aisle, white and black, that’ll give you the shirt off their back.

And I’ve also found people that won’t give you a piece of bread if you’re starving to death.

Finally a breath of fresh words founded in hardcore, intelligent research.

There is – I mean – I found early in life that righteous indignation is a little off-putting, and so I try to couch it with humor.

It is not found in a forest or on a hilltop, nor is it given by a teacher. Where you experience suffering, you can also find freedom from suffering.