“And I really do believe that the most important thing is the way you live your life on earth. But I think it’s enormously comforting to believe that you’re going to see your loved ones.”

But for Muslims, everything that they don’t have on earth is what they get in heaven. They can drink, they can have sex. All of the forbidden pleasures on earth, you can have in paradise.

For a man who likes to talk, Fidel Castro does very few interviews.

The hardest thing you will ever do is trust yourself.

A job is not a career. I think I started out with a job. It turned into a career and changed my life.

A Hot Fudge Sundae and a trashy novel is my idea of heaven.

To excel is to reach your own highest dream. But you must also help others, where and when you can, to reach theirs. Personal gain is empty if you do not feel you have positively touched another’s life.

It’s a fact that it is much more comfortable to be in the position of the person who has been offended than to be the unfortunate cause of it.

Being a parent is tough. If you just want a wonderful little creature to love, you can get a puppy

Work harder than everybody. You’re not going to get it by whining, and you’re not going to get it by shouting, and you’re not going to get it by quitting. You’re going to get it by being there.

Although I myself don’t go to church or synagogue, I do, whether it’s superstition or whatever, pray every time I get on a plane. I just automatically do it. I say the same thing every time.

A good laugh makes any interview, or any conversation, so much better.

politics … is the hottest, most dangerous subject in the land. It’s not only a conversation-wrecker, it’s a friendship-wrecker, a family-wrecker, a job-wrecker, a future-wrecker.

Don’t confuse being stimulating with being blunt.

The feeling is that Fidel Castro’s much bigger than he actually is.

If it’s a woman it’s caustic, if it’s a man it’s authority, If it’s a woman it’s too pushy, if it’s a man it’s aggressive in the best sense of the word.

The news media in general are liberal. If you want to be a reporter, you are going to see poverty and misery, and you have to be involved in the human condition.

The more comfort becomes your priority, the more contracted you become with fear.

I don’t let any personal views about religion cause me to want to take away something that’s offering the patient comfort.

Since we think about ourselves so much of the time, it is comforting to assume … that we really know the score…. [But] this is not an easy assignment.

But Humanity, in its desire for comfort, had over-reached itself. It had exploited the riches of nature too far. Quietly and complacently, it was sinking into decadence, and progress had come to mean the progress of the Machine.

Gritty people train at the edge of their comfort zone. They zero in on one narrow aspect of their performance and set a stretch goal to improve it.

I think we ripple on into others, just like a stone puts its ripples into a brook. That, for me, too, is a source of comfort. It kind of, in a sense, negates the sense of total oblivion.

How defeated and restless the child that is not doing something in which it sees a purpose, a meaning! It is by its self-directed activity that the child, as years pass, finds its work, the thing it wants to do and for which it finally is willing to deny itself pleasure, ease, even sleep and comfort.

From morning till night, sounds drift from the kitchen, most of them familiar and comforting. . . . On days when warmth is the most important need of the human heart, the kitchen is the place you can find it; it dries the wet sock, it cools the hot little brain.