I wouldn't say I have a lack of fear. In fact, I'd like my fear emotion to be less because it's very distracting and fries my nervous system.

The love of the famous, like all strong passions, is quite abstract. Its intensity can be measured mathematically, and it is independent of persons.

I grew up in a working-class Catholic family in south Louisiana. I went to a state university. I taught literature, wrote a novel that was the novel I wanted to write, and got a couple of good reviews but no real traction. I had no idea how to get a job in TV.

I love the Queen. I love the whole fairy tale of the Royal Family; the Crown Jewels; Buckingham Palace; the tourist attraction. But really, is that what we've got a monarchy for? It's just for tourism, and then you survive and live off taxpayers' money?

If you would attract good fortune, you must get rid of doubt. As long as that stands between you and your ambition, it will be a bar that will cut you off. You must have faith. No man can make a fortune while he is convinced that he can't.

In prayer, we stand where angels bow with veiled faces. There, even there, the cherubim and seraphim adore before that selfsame throne to which our prayers ascend. And shall we come there with stunted requests and narrow, contracted faith?

The Taj Mahal can be a tourist attraction, an architectural marvel, but it can never be treated as a monument of faith. After all, there is a difference between tourism and faith.

For most of us, the great danger is not that we will renounce our faith. It is that we will become so distracted and rushed and preoccupied that we will settle for a mediocre version of it. We will just skim our lives instead of actually living them.

In religious and in secular affairs, the more fervent beliefs attract followers. If you are a moderate in any respect - if you're a moderate on abortion, if you're a moderate on gun control, or if you're a moderate in your religious faith - it doesn't evolve into a crusade where you're either right or wrong, good or bad, with us or against us.

Like all alchemists, Trump seeks to convert dross into gold, to toss a broth of his incompetence, denial, delay, deception, and failure into some supernatural alembic and extract political advantage.

By far the most important factor in the success or failure of any school, far more important than tests or standards or business-model methods of accountability, is simply attracting the best-educated, most exciting young people into urban schools and keeping them there.

When you believe in your dream and your vision, then it begins to attract its own resources. No one was born to be a failure.

People who try to tackle failure attract failure. The more you indulge in analysis, it gets tougher. So just keep making mistakes and learn.

I've never been convinced that experience is linear, circular, or even random. It just is. I try to put it in some kind of order to extract meaning from it, to bring meaning to it.

My mind withdrew its thoughts from experience, extracting itself from the contradictory throng of sensuous images, that it might find out what that light was wherein it was bathed... And thus, with the flash of one hurried glance, it attained to the vision of That Which Is.

Most people do not consider dawn to be an attractive experience - unless they are still up.

I just don't believe in love at first sight anymore, even though I've based my whole career on the concept. In my experience, power, money and influence always attract the opposite sex. It's something that I've always exploited - with good results.

The greatest gift is a passion for reading. It is cheap, it consoles, it distracts, it excites, it gives you knowledge of the world and experience of a wide kind. It is a moral illumination.

Quality is a direct experience independent of and prior to intellectual abstractions.

On 'The Apprentice,' I'm 100 per cent certain I'm paid the same as Claude Littner. I insisted on equality when I negotiated my contract. I would not have allowed anything else.

In the absence of relative equality - quid pro quo - a court might question whether there was an actual contract. If I give you a dollar, and you give me a mansion, our contract would lack quid pro quo.

Abstract ideas like equality and liberty have a spurious transparency, and can be used to derive pleasing theorems in the manner of Jean-Jacques Rousseau or John Rawls.

The land is ours. It's not European and we have taken it, we have given it to the rightful people... Those of white extraction who happen to be in the country and are farming are welcome to do so, but they must do so on the basis of equality.

Women's rights is not only an abstraction, a cause; it is also a personal affair. It is not only about us; it is also about me and you. Just the two of us.