“One of the things that happened is I did a lot of shitty gigs. When you do a bunch of shitty bar gigs you have to get used to people yelling at you, you’re used to thinking on the fly, to dealing with weird situations.”

When someone comes along and expresses him or herself as freely as they think, people flock to it. They enjoy it.

Excellence in anything increases your potential in everything.

People love to see people fall.

Haters are all failures. It’s 100% across the board. No one who is truly brilliant at anything is a hater.

There’s a never-ending ocean of techniques out there.

That’s my only goal. Surround myself with funny people, and make sure everyone has a good time and works hard.

The key to happiness doesn’t lay in numbers in a bank account but in the way we make others feel and the way they make us feel.

So instead of investing your time in a passion, you’ve sold your life to work for an uncaring machine that doesn’t understand you. That’s the problem with our society. And what’s the reward? Go home and get a big TV.

Richard Pryor is, in my mind, the most honest comedian. He bared his soul to people. I think that’s why everybody loved him so much.

Once you understand what excellence is all about, you see how excellence manifest itself in any discipline.

If you can lie, you can act, and if you can lie to crazy girlfriends, you can act under pressure.

Have you ever talked to someone, and you’re not even really talking to them? Actors are the worst for that.

People for the most part can smell lies.

I’ve been inspired by a shitload of people in my life so if there’s ever anybody that I can inspire, to me that’s a huge gift.

One of the most fascinating lessons I’ve absorbed about life is that the struggle is good.

Life is about the pursuit of excellence. That pursuit is probably more exciting to me now more than ever.

The sun shines equally on diamond and charcoal, but the former has developed qualities that enable it to reflect the sunlight brilliantly, while the latter is unable to reflect the sunlight. Emulate the diamond in your dealings with people. Brightly reflect the light of God’s love.

If you started in New York you were dealing with the biggest guys in the world. You’re dealing with Charlie Parker and all the big bands and everything. We got more experience working in Seattle.

The cosmos deals in the currency of emotion. When we feel good, goodness flows.

Though a good deal is too strange to be believed, nothing is too strange to have happened.

I am a writer, I deal in words. There is no word that should stay in word jail, every word is completely free. There is no word that is worse than another word. It’s all language, it’s all communication.

When I was young I trained a lot. I trained my mind, I trained my eyes, trained my thinking, how to help people. And it trained me how to deal with pressure.

The test of a government is not how popular it is with the powerful and privileged few but how honestly and fairly it deals with the many who must depend on it.

I am deeply skeptical of trade deals in general.But the only way they can get a number of Democrats is by doing a strong real currency bill that goes after the worst of the trading partners, the one that`s stealing our high-end jobs.