I am not one who was born in the custody of wisdom; I am one who is fond of olden times and intense in quest of the sacred knowing of the ancients.

It happened in Miami, in Coral Gables, a great big ol' Cuban wedding. It was pretty intense.

Tennis is all about mental toughness, and you have to keep your head in the game. I make time to relax away from competition pressures, travel and intense training schedules to make sure I'm looking after myself. Taking time out with family and friends helps to maintain the work-life balance everyone needs.

The first year or so on The Daily Show is pretty intense in terms of travel. You're going to the worst places in the country, talking to the craziest people in the world.

Every day is intense and alive, whether it's travel, work, even down time, which there is so little of.

I had started writing as a poet in a closed, post-Revival, claustrophobic world, where the shadows of the national upheaval and the intense effort - the intense self-conscious effort - to make a literary movement were still evident. Now we lived a life as writers that was more cosmopolitan, more open, that had more travel and exchange.

Technology has eliminated the basement darkroom and the whole notion of photography as an intense labor of love for obsessives and replaced them with a sense of immediacy and instant gratification.

All art is an intensely vulnerable gesture, and it is made with no small amounts of risk, and fear. So, I have plenty of sympathy for self-defense mechanisms, especially among artists.

Uncontrolled, the hunger and thirst after God may become an obstacle, cutting off the soul from what it desires. If a man would travel far along the mystic road, he must learn to desire God intensely but in stillness, passively and yet with all his heart and mind and strength.

There was a perception of me, and I earned it because I was really intense, really gruff. I treated certain people poorly at times. It was because of who I was. It was almost my strength. I came in all business. I tried to find ways to fit in with that demeanor, but it's not easy.

I felt the most intense pleasure in piercing the stone in order to make an abstract form and space; quite a different sensation from that of doing it for the purpose of realism.

There is a very intense culture of secrecy in Britain that hasn't yet been dismantled. What passes for transparency here would serve any secret society well.

Mythology and science both extend the scope of human beings. Like science and technology, mythology, as we shall see, is not about opting out of this world, but about enabling us to live more intensely within it.

My experience, with both my parents, is that grief has a lot of down, sad things, but I was also really emotionally raw, in the first year after each of them passed. Flowers smelled more intensely, my relationships were hotter, and I was more willing to risk. I was going for it a lot more. I was 'unsober' and I wasn't playing by my rules.

It's a sad indication of where Washington has come, where policy differences almost necessarily become questions of integrity. I came to Washington in the late '70s, and people had the ability in the past to have intense policy differences but didn't feel the need to question the other person's character.

I was told so many times when I was a kid, 'I can't be friends with you, you're too intense, you're too sad all the time.' I really thought that when I made the first album that everyone would understand me, all the people who weren't my friends would become my friends.

Psychologists maintain that the dizzying feeling of intense romantic love lasts only about 18 months to - at best - three years.

There's something about marriage that is not as intensely romantic or interesting as a couple's first meeting.

'Aashiq' is a romantic film, even though my character is a rather aggressive guy. You could even call it an intense romance. And working with Indra Kumar has been an excellent experience. He is a great director.

Properly, we should read for power. Man reading should be man intensely alive. The book should be a ball of light in one's hand.

Writing poetry makes you intensely conscious of how words sound, both aloud and inside the head of the reader. You learn the weight of words and how they sound to the ear.

The game of basketball has been everything to me. My place of refuge, place I've always gone where I needed comfort and peace. It's been the site of intense pain and the most intense feelings of joy and satisfaction. It's a relationship that has evolved over time, given me the greatest respect and love for the game.

Deciding together to have a child and sharing in child-rearing do not immunize a marriage. Indeed, collaborative couples can face other problems. They often embark on such an intense style of parenting that they end up paying less attention to each other.

When I was a kid, my mother's parenting style teetered between benign neglect and intense bouts of violence.