Quotes

I'm not a hero or a superstar. I'm an everyday guy. I feel happy when children approach me. I feel that something good is happening in life when little kids recognise me.

I've never had a message for anyone in my entire life. Except maybe to give out my room number.

Professionally, South has contributed in whatever standing I have. And yes, personally, too, it has given the joy of my life, Sridevi.

When antibiotics became industrially produced following World War II, our quality of life and our longevity improved enormously. No one thought bacteria were going to become resistant.

It's a manic-depressive life. You run in here, you open your incubator, your experiment makes no sense, you think, 'I hate this job.' Then ten minutes later you think, 'Well, now, maybe I'll try this or I'll try that.' You do it because you know there will be an 'a-ha!' day.

I want to make a drug. I want the science to be more than imaginary, where I think, 'We're learning these fundamental principles, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.' I think we are doing that, but I want to do something really practical. I want to actually, in my lifetime, help people.

I'm from New York; I've been in show business all my life. I'm a wild and crazy gal, yet I always play these soft, warm, loving earth mothers. It's a pain in the butt. I'm a femme fatale!

What I've learned from my own journey, and from my family's experience with cancer, is how important it is to stay positive and move forward. Not every day is going to be perfect; that's life. But staying positive is going to get you to the next day.

Prejudice and discrimination based on our differences is an unfortunate fact of life.

My career is really, really important, and I love it, but the life highs - like seeing my son graduate - need to me to be more important than the career highs, which are fleeting.

I've been trained and lived my entire life on the smallscreen.

Hope is a key ingredient in what drives creativity - the hope of bringing to life what exists in the imagination, of transforming the ordinary into the extraordinary - so it's completely logical that Hollywood is the entertainment capital of the world. It's full of people bursting with the desire to make the world laugh, cry, think.

There's so much interest and curiosity about alien life, interstellar travel. It's always in the news.

If I've learned one thing in life, it's: Stand for something or you'll fall for anything.

I think families are so great, because when you go home, no matter what you've accomplished in your life, you still are the person you were in sixth grade to them. You know, it never really changes.

I've been so fortunate in my career and my own life just to have all these opportunities, and the talk show has always been one of my favorite formats.

I was very down as a teenager, very upset because I had gotten hurt in a car accident. But my dad was a source of strength. He used to say, 'It's the character with strength that God gives the most challenges to.' I've thought about that so many times in my life when things didn't go right.

If an executive producer has written a certain line, and an actress says it, and it's not very funny, you don't dare go to them and say, 'I don't like this,' because it will make your life miserable.

I think what happens is that some writers, who are so great in television or whatever, once they become successful, they get out of the loop of real life. It's real hard to draw on something to write.

I'm a deeply boring person in real life; I don't do any drinking and going out until four in the morning. I'll usually head straight home for a cup of tea.

I was always drawn to the blues. Alberta Hunter at the Cookery was a life-changing experience. I only wanted to get enriched as a performer as I got older, to have an audience which got older, too, and would come to see me when I'm 80.

I think we have responsibilities to be active in the things we believe in, regardless of what our job is. At least in my lifetime, there has been a tremendous combining of activism and music, that came up in the era of Pete Seeger and the Weavers and Joan Baez and Bob Dylan and Peter Paul & Mary.

Sometimes I'm more true when I'm up onstage than I'm able to be in my regular life. It's not as exciting to be at home, but I've got to learn how to make that work, and then I will be an ordinary woman.

Sometimes I don't go into the studio for quite a while because I haven't found enough good songs. They have to have a certain caliber and connect with me because I'm going to be playing them for the rest of my life. I start off with a circle of friends whose songs I love anyway.

One of the biggest obstacles I've overcome in my life was thinking I didn't deserve to be successful. Artistically I'm not as much of a heavyweight as someone like Paul Simon or Joni Mitchell, because I'm not a creator of original music, and I worried about that for years.