“I don’t know why it is that we need to denigrate, to knock down. It’s so sick.”

Life’s too short. Start with Dessert!

I don’t like the word ‘superstar’. It has ridiculous implications. These words – star, stupor, superstar, stupid star – they’re misleading. It’s a myth.

There is nothing more important in life than love.

I worked in a Chinese restaurant.

A human being is only interesting if he’s in contact with himself.

I got sent to a health camp when I was about 6 years old, and we all had to wear the same starchy blue uniform. The lady who took care of me after school knit me a burgundy sweater. It was the only thing that gave me any individuality.

I’m a work in progress.

Sometimes, when you work with mediocre talents, they feel entitled. They act like stars. Genuinely talented people don’t.

New York critics – I hear when one of them watched “A Star Is Born”, he talked back to the screen.

My biggest nightmare is I’m driving home and get sick and go to hospital. I say: ‘Please help me.’ And the people say: ‘Hey, you look like…’ And I’m dying while they’re wondering whether I’m Barbra Streisand.

Why does a woman work ten years to change a man’s habits and then complain that he’s not the man she married?

Everybody’s frightened a bit. But how many of us just go through the fear and do it anyway?

I knew that with a mouth like mine, I just hadda be a star or something.

I think when I was younger, I wanted to be a star, until I became a star, and then it’s a lot of work. It’s work to be a star. I don’t enjoy the stardom part. I only enjoy the creative process.

. . . it is true, even people with painful childhoods. . . grow up to be more interesting people. So, there’s always a positive to a negative.

I don’t care what you say about me. Just be sure to spell my name wrong.

Hate is a fear, and fear is rot That cankers root and fruit alike, Fight cleanly then, hate not, fear not, Strike with no madness when you strike.

But that so many scholars are barbarians does not much matter so long as a few of them are ready to help with their specialized knowledge the few independent thinkers, that is to say the poets, who try to to keep civilization alive.

Not a having and a resting, but a growing and a becoming, is the character of perfection as culture conceives it.

The university is our culture’s assertion that what is made by the mind has value and can convey values.

Culture being a pursuit of our total perfection by means of getting to know, on all the matters which most concern us, the best which has been thought and said in the world.

Business could not make dull, nor passion wild; Who saw life steadily, and saw it whole.

Right now it feels like we’re playing a role, like me and a couple of my friends, in where popular culture is going. That’s a very rare thing in a person’s life to be able to be a part of that. It’s a responsibility I take seriously.

The sophist sneers: Fool, take Thy pleasure, right or wrong! The pious wail: Forsake A world these sophists throng! Be neither saint nor sophist-led, but be a man.