Quotes

The way I choose to live my own life rates time and space as real luxuries.

I don't believe that saying things because you feel they are what people want to hear is the right way to be in any part of your life.

I eat out three times a day most days of the year. This is no big deal to most New Yorkers, and it is not something I am necessarily proud of - it's simply the nature of my itinerant life.

For me, life is not about gold taps and marble all over the place.

Art is the ultimate luxury good, but one that can make you think, give a you a blast of beauty and enhance your life. Even if the work's made of plasticine.

People who get through life dependent on other people's possessions are always the first to lecture you on how little possessions count.

Every Thanksgiving, for the most part in my life, I've come to Deerfield in Chicago.

Without risk you can't experience life. There have to be risks, physically and mentally, taken by everyone.

We're a much more touchy-feely, hands-on generation than our fathers but juggling work, family and social life and trying to be romantic and keep yourself fit is really hard. I want to be the perfect dad but you can't be the perfect dad unless you compromise elsewhere.

People are being overwhelmed with social issues, political problems and economic problems - and this notion of giving everything up and going to live off-grid and to have a simpler way of life is quite attractive.

I think we are becoming more obsessed about getting a certain amount of likes on our Twitter and Instagram accounts rather than actually living a proper, real, honest and organic life.

When suddenly your focus changes, you see the years going by and it's an extra reminder that you don't want to live life with any regrets.

I saw firsthand the devastating consequences of poaching. I saw elephants with ivory hacked from their faces and the lengths private parks go to protect their precious wildlife.

Many locals in east Africa are calling for fences to separate wildlife and people. They argue it will reduce conflict and also make it easier to protect the wildlife from poachers. From my experience in Tanzania, no fence and no militia will hold back the tide of poachers drawn by the huge sums of money at stake.

Both my wife and I are optimists and we look at the positives in life.

I'm a naturally upbeat person. Friends sometimes compare me to a labrador puppy, and I take that as a great compliment. I love life, I love people and I've got loads of energy right up to the moment when I'm suddenly asleep.

Many of us will endure a lifetime following others. Institutionalisation suits many but not all. Some of us thrive beyond those boundaries.

I like collecting things, much to my wife's annoyance. I keep mementoes because I'm proud of all the things I've done, but also to remind myself, when I'm having a difficult time at home, that there are always tougher, harder things to get through in life.

Everyone, when you're a teenager and you're growing up, you do feel like your life is dramatic enough to be on a TV screen, but we know that it's not.

I'm not going to beat this life. It's gonna get me in the end. So accepting that is a real freedom and finding a joy in working that I haven't allowed myself before.

People tell me I look angry. I thought my dad was mad at me his whole life, but it turns out that was just his mug - and I inherited it.

The Gilded Age robber barons - the Goulds, the Vanderbilts, the Morgans and Rockefellers - did quite well under laissez-faire. Most of the rest of Americans were still stuck in the ditch, with little to no economic security, life expectancy of roughly 45 years, and horrific infant mortality rates that claimed 300 babies per 1,000 in the cities.

I think I was lucky to come of age in a place and time - the American South in the 1960s and '70s - when the machine hadn't completely taken over life. The natural world was still the world, and machines - TV, telephone, cars - were still more or less ancillary, and computers were unheard of in everyday life.

Political rights notwithstanding, 'freedom' rings awfully hollow when you're getting nickel-and-dimed to death in your everyday life.

We all pine for a time in life when things were simpler. Even when they weren't necessarily simpler, hindsight makes them look a lot simpler. The reality of it was that it wasn't.