“What would be the first thing I’d add back? Jesus. It sounds a little bit like a Sunday school answer, but that’s what I do. Then what’s the next thing? And I’d say, well, loving people. And then the next.”

If you spend 10,000 hours on the bunny slope, you’re never going to win the World Cup.

Just remember, during the winter, far beneath the bitter snow, that there’s a seed that with the sun’s love in the spring becomes a rose.

There’s a kind of edge to what you’re doing, the kind of leading edge of what you’re doing. Inside that edge [are elements you] are familiar with, and are probably becoming slightly bored with, as well, over a period of time. “I’ve pulled that one out before. Oh, no, I can’t I’m just fed up with that.

Saying that cultural objects have value is like saying that telephones have conversations.

I don’t like celebrity programmes – but I do like programmes about how ideas are formed and evolve.

It’s nice, I think, when people use your music for things you didn’t think of.

Admirers can be a tremendous force for conservatism.

All cultures have these feelings about non-functional areas of activity. And the more time people have on their hands, the more they commit it to those areas.

Painting, I think it’s like jazz.

Humor, for me, is really a gate of departure. Its a way of enticing a reader into a poem so that less funny things can take place later. It really is not an end in itself, but a means to an end.

Unfortunately, a lot of people are stupid. They take drugs. They get drunk and do all the wrong things in life. I just played it straight.

You have to watch what you eat.

One of the things I’ve had the advantage of, growing up and being close to the top management of this company and other companies for most of my life, is seeing how CEOs start to believe in their own infallibility. And that really scares me.

I talk to myself all the time. Just make sure you answer.

When you’re faced with an opponent, the media asks the questions, and I answer truthfully. I don’t hold back.

In the last analysis, it is our conception of death which decides our answers to all the questions that life puts to us.

No humorist is under any obligation to provide answers and probably if you were to delve into the literary history of humour it’s probably all about not providing answers because the humorist essentially says: this is the way things are.

It comes to the one who rests upon the promises of the Word. It comes to the man who lives by faith as if in the actual possession of the answer to his prayer, although the enemy is still around him.

Forgiveness is the answer to the child’s dream of a miracle by which what is broken is made whole again, what is soiled is made clean again.

One said of suicide, As long as one has brains one should not blow them out. And another answered, But when one has ceased to have them, too often one cannot.

As human beings, don’t we need questions without answers as well as questions with answers, questions that we might someday answer and questions that we can never answer?