Gratitude is the inward feeling of kindness received. Thankfulness is the natural impulse to express that feeling. Thanksgiving is the following of that impulse.

I have no way of knowing how people really feel but the vast majority of those I meet couldn't be nicer. Every once in a while someone barks at me. My New Year's resolution is not to bark back.

A man knows when he is growing old because he begins to look like his father.

To a father growing old nothing is dearer than a daughter.

Chum was a British boy's weekly which at the end of the year was bound into a single huge book and the following Christmas parents bought it as Christmas presents for male children.

My Christmas wish would be to have an entire week off. To spend it with my family and just curl up and watch Christmas movies when it's snowing outside.

My favorite toy growing up was Polly Pocket. But one gift that I wanted though never received for Christmas was a pair of trampoline moon shoes. You strap them to your feet and they have springs on them and you can just jump around!

The security comes as an actor in knowing that you're not in control. If you try to control your career or how people perceive you you'll make yourself unhappy because life doesn't work like that. So much is luck. It's much better to let yourself off to think 'There's nothing I can do.'

Work joyfully and peacefully knowing that right thoughts and right efforts inevitably bring about right results.

You can't get there by bus only by hard work and risk and by not quite knowing what you're doing. What you'll discover will be wonderful. What you'll discover will be yourself.

Good management consists in showing average people how to do the work of superior people.

If you do not feel yourself growing in your work and your life broadening and deepening if your task is not a perpetual tonic to you you have not found your place.

I don't really care what people tell children - when you believe in Santa Claus the Easter Bunny and the Tooth Fairy one more fib won't hurt. But I am infuriated by the growing notion posited in some touchy-feely quarters that all women are or can be beautiful.

My favorite play in drama school was 'The Bacchae.' It's about a king who literally gets eaten alive by all the women in the play in a kind of orgy - it's related to the word 'bacchanal' - and I loved that idea of animalistic chaos and following our own desires.

It was easy to persecute me without people feeling ashamed. It was easy to vilify me and project me as a woman who was not following the tradition of a 'good African woman' and as a highly educated elitist who was trying to show innocent African women ways of doing things that were not acceptable to African men.

Growing up with the childhood that I had I learned to never let a man make me feel helpless and it also embedded a deep need in me to always stick up for women.

John Currin's exaggerated realism and his twisted women kept me off balance never knowing if they were sincere or ironic or some new emotion.

Instead of looking at life as a narrowing funnel we can see it ever widening to choose the things we want to do to take the wisdom we've learned and create something.

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.

The key to wisdom is knowing all the right questions.

I feel increasingly like age is very irrelevant. Quite often cynicism is confused with wisdom and my scorn is confused with a knowing which I don't have.

One part of wisdom is knowing what you don't need anymore and letting it go.

Wisdom is knowing when you can't be wise.

Wisdom consists not so much in knowing what to do in the ultimate as knowing what to do next.