“I’ve always liked working really hard and then doing nothing in particular. So, consequently, I didn’t overexpose myself; I guess I maintained a kind of mystery. I wasn’t ambitious.”

I hear these melodies. I hear horn lines and string lines. That’s what’s fun about recording with an orchestra.

I’m sure that I don’t know everything I want to know. I have so much more to learn.

My friend Quincy Jones says we won our first Grammys together in 1963. I have no recollection. I don’t even remember the room. When he showed me the picture, I remembered what I wore. But it’s like awards don’t mean anything.

It’s like an American tradition. A person gets successful and then he’s supposed to change for the worse. It’s silly.

The dream – you never achieve it. The excitement of life lies in the hope, in the striving for something rather than the attainment.

Issues of foreign policy have a place in every election for President.

Everyone has a right to love and be loved, and nobody on this earth has the right to tell anyone that their love for another human being is morally wrong.

I’m not that ambitious any more. I just like my privacy. I wish I really wasn’t talked about at all.

Myths are a waste of time. They prevent progression.

The idea of a liberal media bias is simply a myth. If only it were true, we might have a more humane, open-minded, and ultimately effective public debate on the issues facing the country.

Why don’t you have a cup of coffee at least? I, um, I’m a little low in sugar and I don’t have any cream, but it’s real coffee.

Around people I don’t know, I’m totally at a loss.

I prefer things that are private, so I love recording and I love making films, as a filmmaker, because it uses every bit of what you have experienced or know, whether it’s graphics composition, decorating, psychology, storytelling, or whatever it is. It’s a wonderful thing.

We cannot let the right wing roll back more than thirty years of social progress.

What is exciting is not for one person to be stronger than the other… but for two people to have met their match and yet they are equally as stubborn, as obstinate, as passionate, as crazy as the other.

There’s a part of you that always remains a child, no matter how mature you get, how sophisticated or weary.

Maybe it’s a little ambitious of me to presume that no matter how big the film is, that I can always go down to the shop to buy a pint of milk.

Don’t be afraid to be ambitious about your goals. Hard work never stops. Neither should your dreams.

All women are ambitious naturally.

With the ambitious, the failure of one expedient is the suggestion of another; but with the irresolute, defeat usually occasions abandonment of purpose.

My main ambition as a gardener is to water my orange trees with gin, then all I have to do is squeeze the juice into a glass.

Don’t be too ambitious. Do the most important thing you can think of doing every year and then your career will take care of itself.

I’m going to let love lead the way, always. And I was born with this blind-blind ambition, and it’s kind of gotten me here to this point. And I think that I’ll stick to it.

I was deeply, delightfully in love with a guy whose forceful intellect and ambition could possibly end up swallowing mine.