Amma

I have some wonderful friends from the Mideast that are as red, white and blue as anybody you know, that have been harassed, and I think it’s a terrible, terrible thing.

My pessimism extends to the point of even suspecting the sincerity of the pessimists.

If you can find a way to be truly ambivalent about what people think about you as an artist you’re completely freed up because you just end up doing things that turn you on creatively, and then as a person you really try and drown the noise.

A goal is a dream with a finish line.

Mr. Watson , come here, I want you

When everyone is against you, it means that you are absolutely wrong– or absolutely right.

You can’t get away from yourself by moving from one place to another. There’s nothing to that.

It is better to fail at your own life than to succeed at someone else’s.

Many people are busy trying to find better ways of doing things that should not have to be done at all. There is no progress in merely finding a better way to do a useless thing.

If you don’t make mistakes, you’re not working on hard enough problems. And that’s a big mistake.

Let us not forget: I didn’t just wake up First Lady… I mean, I went to law school, I practised law, I worked for the city, I ran a nonprofit (and) I was an executive at a hospital. I’ve been in the world. I’ve worked in every sector, and you don’t do that without coming up against some stuff. You know, having your feelings hurt, having people say things about you that aren’t true… Life hits you, so over the course of living, you learn how to protect yourself in it. You learn to take in what you need and get rid of the stuff that’s clearly not true.

Muddy water is best cleared by leaving it alone.

I don’t have an alarm clock. If someone needs to wake me up, then I have my BlackBerry next to me.

We learn something every day, and lots of times it’s that what we learned the day before was wrong.