But charity is a very complicated thing. It’s important to find an area where you can really help and you can feel the results. Charity is not like feeding pigeons in the square. It is a process that requires professional management.

I’m very outspoken. I will ask a silly question, but I really am deadly serious. I want to know the answer.

[on her parents] They’re very harsh critics and they’ve often said to me: “That was shit, you were crap’, but this is the first time (after he saw her as “Amy Foster” on Swept from the Sea) my father said to me: ‘I think one day you’ll be a good actress”!

The aim of life is to live, and to live means to be aware, joyously, drunkenly, serenely, divinely aware.

Get out there and improvise and take chances and don’t be a perfectionist.

To be calm is the highest achievement of the self.

Let us my friends snatch our opportunity from the passing day.

Love is the free exercise of choice. Two people love each other only when they are quite capable of living without each other but choose to live with each other.

Because if you do what you think is right for the benefit of everybody and everything and you make decisions, to go back and regret them afterwards-it’s a futile experience and it’s not worth thinking about. Because life just unfolds. Provided you do your best and you think you’re on the right track, you can only be right or wrong. But to regret it-I don’t think there are any huge errors or misdemeanors. You know, I should have hung out with Elvis a bit more.

It is fatal to enter an war without the will to win it.

According to what you’re taught in economics courses, our system is based on free markets with entrepreneurial initiative and rational choices by informed consumers. Well, the reality is radically different.

In God we trust; all others must pay cash.

It is also a testament to the role that Ireland and its citizens have played towards combating world hunger, poverty and under-development in agriculture and rural development,

Should you find yourself in a chronically leaking boat, energy devoted to changing vessels is likely to be more productive than energy devoted to patching leaks.

Wisdom is knowing the right path to take. Integrity is taking it.

In music the passions enjoy themselves.

The global environment crisis is, as we say in Tennessee, real as rain, and I cannot stand the thought of leaving my children with a degraded earth and a diminished future.

In my music, I’m trying to play the truth of what I am. The reason it’s difficult is because I’m changing all the time.

Montreal was a very active jazz center until club owners started putting in strippers instead of music. Before long, there was nothing to hear.

Winners lose much more often than losers. So if you keep losing but you’re still trying, keep it up! You’re right on track.

Nothing is too high for the daring of mortals: we storm heaven itself in our folly.