“Russians not only vehemently despise blacks, they believe Africa begins at the Ukraine border.”

The weirder you’re going to behave, the more normal you should look. It works in reverse, too. When I see a kid with three or four rings in his nose, I know there is absolutely nothing extraordinary about that person.

A fundamental American question is, ‘What’s the big idea?’

I’ve got a 1990 Porsche 911. It’s just a Carrera, a very simple, straightforward little thing that goes like stink. I love it.

Every vote should carry a serial number, so that responsibility for harmful or careless use of the vote can be traced. Concealed voting should be outlawed.

The body is forever teaching us lessons. There are all sorts of things that we can’t do, shouldn’t do, had better not do very often or do for too long as we get older. The body makes its presence known.

The baby boomers’ politics have covered a wide band of silliness, from the Weather Underground to the Timothy McVeigh types. The great majority of us are well in the middle of that spectrum, but still, there’s been both leftie silliness and right-wing silliness.

Never fight an inanimate object.

Finland is a rich country. What have they got? They got Nokia phones and plywood. How’d they get so rich? Because they’re free.

Political leaders are expert at saying nothing.

They are just really stupid people in Hollywood. You write them a script, and they say they love it, they absolutely love it. Then they say, ‘But doesn’t it need a small dog, and an Eskimo, and shouldn’t it be set in New Guinea?’ And you say, ‘But it is a sophisticated romantic comedy set in Paris.’

Political systems are run by self-selecting politicians. We don’t draft people; it’s not jury duty.

Everybody is xenophobic to an extent.

Liberals have invented whole college majors – psychology, sociology and women’s studies – to prove that nothing is anybody’s fault.

There is only one thing that gives me hope as a Republican, and that is the Democrats. It’s going to be hard to do a worse job running American than the Republicans have, but if anybody can do it, it’s the Democrats.

You’re never going to read ‘The Wealth of Nations,’ and you shouldn’t, really. It’s 900 pages.

Bill Clinton is not a hypocrite. If a man believes that it is just and moral to redistribute wealth, there is nothing hypocritical in his attempts to redistribute some of that wealth to himself.

To be beautiful, woman enough to have a black sweater, black skirt and walk arm in arm with the man she loves.

Chanel is composed of only a few elements, white camellias, quilted bags and Austrian doorman’s jackets, pearls, chains, shoes with black toes. I use these elements like notes to play with.

We’re all Africans, everyone – black, white, yellow.

One is never over-dressed or underdressed with a Little Black Dress.

We all tend to be in the same circles – people like my Wu-Tang brothers, or Black Thought from The Roots.

But then, when I did go, the contrast between Leeds, which was very black and sooty in those days, and Cambridge, which seemed like something out of a fairystory, in the grip of a hard frost, was just wonderful.

The dream was not to put one black family in the White House, the dream was to make everything equal in everybody’s house.

No one would get into doing a black-and-white comic because they thought it might be a route to riches.