Quotes

I've felt like an outsider all my life. It comes from my mother, who always felt like an outsider in my father's family. She was a powerful woman, and she motivated my father.

My life turned out to be beyond my greatest dreams.

This industry has been really good to me. It's been a great life. I'm not through yet. I'm ready when you are, Mr. DeMille.

I've been composing music all my life and if I'd been clever enough at school I would like to have gone to music college.

I feel very privileged to have reached so many kids because a life without stories, without the power of books, would be a very grey world, it's good to add colour.

Throughout history, story telling was at the very beginning of life.

The most important things in life aren't things.

The only real failure in life is one not learned from.

Promise yourself to live your life as a revolution and not just a process of evolution.

If life doesn't offer a game worth playing, then invent a new one.

I ain't trying to fight until I'm 35. I'm trying to make my money and go on to something different - do bigger and better things with my life. Hell, I don't want to get punched in the head that damn much. I've got other things I want to do.

I just enjoy my life, go with the flow and spend time with the people that I love.

I became so disciplined when I was on tag. I would be at home by eight o'clock, and because I had boxing, I lived the disciplined life. I started reading because I learnt that so many champions educated themselves. Joe Louis, Mike Tyson, Bernard Hopkins. Before, it was 'act now, think later' - but the discipline and reading changed me.

I still feel I am that 14-year-old kid, hungry and trying to find a way through life. That's what I'm trying to develop, trying to be good at something through boxing. But I feel like that young kid who's trying and trying.

Boxing is the embodiment of who I am, but beyond that, this is a journey of the self, and my obsession to get the most from this short life.

My mum and dad aren't together, but she plays a massive part in my life. We have deep conversations: I tell her where I need support, where I feel she's lacking, and I support her with whatever she needs. I understand she won't be here forever, and I want no regrets.

Sometimes life's so much cooler when you just don't know any better and all the painful lessons have not hammered your head open yet.

I never really thought in terms of the concept of being a rock star - being around people like that just seemed like normal day-in-the-life stuff to me. Those were just the surroundings I grew up in.

Four years into the life of my son, I realize I'm so in love with him and he's so in love with me that if I don't find that lifelong partner out there, it's okay.

The only way to security for Israel and a humane life for Palestinians in their own land is political. No matter where the fault for past negotiating failures lies, there is no other path.

Desperation is a fact of life in many poor, overcrowded countries.

Attacking the indecency of life in much of the Southern Hemisphere is no longer a matter of grace, of charity, of patronizing kindness. It is a matter of intense self-interest.

After spending the last few years working on a serious novel set in Chechnya, I was drawn to both the brevity and casualness of Twitter, and wrote a series of tweets titled 'The Erotic Inner Life of Mr. Bates from Downton Abbey.'

A novel can enlarge the empathy and imagination of both its author and its reader, and my experience, that sense of enlargement is most intense when I'm transported beyond the narrow limits of my daily life.

I quickly realized I live the least interesting literary life imaginable. My parents are happily married. There haven't been any major traumas. I'm not sure that the story of my life would be much fun to read.