“There’s something about the authenticity that Hollywood is missing when it comes to urban culture.”

I think it’s very important. I’ve gone into prisons to meditate with inmates. It’s something I plan to do with Tim Robbins soon.

Hollywood is full of very liberal people, but it still has an infrastructure that needs to be broken.

I don’t believe that people create their own visions. Rather, I believe that visions are actually God’s way of communicating with us.

Not every move you make has to be a great leap

The elected officials should be working for the voters who elected them. Money corrupts the process. Why would you be giving a candidate money unless you expect something in return?

The research shows that if you meditate, the mind becomes still, and they can see the functionality and gray matter in the brain increase, the nervous system calm, the immune system improve and a reduction in stress.

I think that diversity is key for the next American entrepreneurs. They want to be a part of this society where there is so much diversity they have to have people from all the experiences.

The world belongs to the people who say, ‘I can’.

Well, it’s the last step of the Civil Rights Movement: you know, wrap your hands around some money.

No matter where you’re from or what you’ve done, you’re never stuck in a particular circumstance, relationship, or cycle unless you say you are.

You have to be present, awake and happy now.

I think I’m less afraid of failure than some others.

No matter where you want to go, as long as you follow your path with faith, dedication and hard work, you are going to get there.

A poet or a comedian can say what’s on the mind of people. They should be funny. They should make you laugh. It may be so truthful that it hurts, but it makes you laugh.

I applaud what the Oscars are doing to promote diversity. I think it’s great.

Never pass up any opportunity to share your gifts with the world.

Nothing in our culture, not even home computers, is more overrated than the epidermal felicity of two featherless bipeds in desperate congress.

A woman, even a brilliant woman, must have two qualities in order to fulfill her promise: more energy than mere mortals, and the ability to outwit her culture.

I think that New York is not the cultural centre of America, but the business and administrative centre of American culture.

There is no hierarchy of values by which one culture has the right to insist on all its own values and deny those of another.

I take a cooking class everywhere I travel. I find it’s the best way to get to know a culture.

Human beings seem to hold on more tenaciously to a cultural identity that is learned through suffering than to one that has been acquired through pleasure and delight.

As the traveler who has once been from home is wiser than he who has never left his own doorstep, so a knowledge of one other culture should sharpen our ability to scrutinize more steadily, to appreciate more lovingly, our own.

in all cultures, human beings – in order to be human – must understand the nonhuman.