“The biggest killers of children around the world are two things: diarrhea and pneumonia. When you think about it, in the United States, kids don’t die of diarrhea anymore, but it’s a huge problem in the developing world.”

Women around the world should have a tool that helps them plan their pregnancies.

Helping people doesn’t have to be an unsound financial strategy.

You can have the best vaccines for a woman or her child, but if you can’t get her to come and get them then they won’t work.

It is still just unbelievable to us that diarrhea is one of the leading causes of child deaths in the world.

Housework comes first, so girls often fall behind in school. Global statistics show that it’s increasingly girls, not boys, who don’t know how to read.

All lives have an equal value.

Any social or cultural change has to be made openly and with people agreeing. You don’t get there by just pushing an outsider’s point of view.

Men make different investments than women do. Women tend to invest more of their earnings than men do in their family’s well-being – as much as 10 times more.

If you don’t have an effective teacher in front of the classroom, you won’t change the trajectory for students.

Having children made us look differently at all these things that we take for granted, like taking your child to get a vaccine against measles or polio.

When we invest in women and girls, we are investing in the people who invest in everyone else.

I realized that the only way to get into a good college was to be valedictorian or salutatorian. So that was my goal.

When we invest in women, we invest in a powerful source of global development.

Women speaking up for themselves and for those around them is the strongest force we have to change the world.

Now we just really need to do the work, which we’re doing, to get contraceptives out to women worldwide.

We [with Bill Gates] started to make decisions about what we’d invest in. Then I actually started traveling for the foundation. I’ve probably been to India now eight times at least and Africa numerous times.

There are two types of films – one made by the big-time producers, the other is low budget stuff made by some producers who make films for the heck of it, they complete their films for small amounts, sell it at low costs with almost no publicity.

I have had with novel writing, and I have put to bed big chunks of work that just didn’t sustain my interest.

Just because you’re from the minimalist school, it doesn’t mean you can’t go big.

The big print giveth and the small print taketh away.

Whenever a songwriter writes a big hit, then the next 20 songs they write – no matter how bad they are – get recorded.

American companies will have a big shot at Iraqi oil.

We still don’t understand how the big bang and evolving all the way to the human species and so on. So all of this is going to be a very, very exciting to the new people.

All you have to do is say “yes.” Don’t make some big project out of it. Don’t make some big deal out of it. Just say “yes.” You don’t even know what it means to say “yes,” but you say it anyway. You’ll never know what it means to say “yes,” but you do it anyway.