Eating is so intimate. It's very sensual. When you invite someone to sit at your table and you want to cook for them, you're inviting a person into your life.

The best comfort food will always be greens, cornbread, and fried chicken.

When you are enthusiastic about what you do, you feel this positive energy. It's very simple.

I think you can have 10,000 explanations for failure, but no good explanation for success.

Beauty is the greatest seducer of man.

Every day I try to be in communication with the universe in an unconscious way.

I lived in a dictatorship in Brazil, and I was arrested three times. I felt in my flesh what it is to live under such a regime and experience deprivation of freedom.

Tell your heart that the fear of suffering is worse than the suffering itself. And no heart has ever suffered when it goes in search of its dream.

Writing is a solitary experience. I'm extremely superstitious. If I talk about the book or name the title out loud before finishing, I feel the energy I need to write will be drained. It's so intimate, I can't even share it with my wife.

I am not happy, and the quest for happiness as a principal objective is not part of my world. Of course, ever since I can remember, I have done what I felt like doing.

I always was a rich person because money's not related to happiness.

Of course, to have money is just great because you can do what you think is important to you. I always was a rich person because money's not related to happiness.

Happiness is just another of the tricks that our genetic system plays on us to carry out its only role, which is the survival of the species.

We want to answer this classical question, who am I? So I think that most of our works are for art, or whatever we do, including science or religion, tried to answer that question.

I have seen many storms in my life. Most storms have caught me by surprise, so I had to learn very quickly to look further and understand that I am not capable of controlling the weather, to exercise the art of patience and to respect the fury of nature.

With all due respect, the Mona Lisa is overrated.

In writing, I apply my feminine side and respect the mystery involved in creation.

Love is a trap. When it appears, we see only its light, not its shadows.

One is loved because one is loved. No reason is needed for loving.

I'm not saying that love always takes you to heaven. Your life can become a nightmare. But that said, it is worth taking the risk.

Everybody is a political person, whether you say something or you are silent. A political attitude is not whether you go to parliament; it's how you deal with your life, with your surroundings.

It took me 40 years to write my first book. When I was a child, I was encouraged to go to school. I was not encouraged to follow the career of a writer because my parents thought that I was going to starve to death.

I was not encouraged to follow the career of a writer because my parents thought that I was going to starve to death. They thought nobody can make a living from being a writer in Brazil. They were not wrong.

Remember your dreams and fight for them. You must know what you want from life. There is just one thing that makes your dream become impossible: the fear of failure.

All women have a perception much more developed than men. So all women somehow, being repressed for so many millennia, they ended up by developing this sixth sense and contemplation and love. And this is something that we have a hard time to accept as part of our society.

I talk to my readers on social networking sites, but I never tell them what the book is about. Writing is lonely, so from time to time I talk to them on the Internet. It's like chatting at a bar without leaving your office. I talk with them about a lot of things other than my books.

I believe enlightenment or revelation comes in daily life. I look for joy, the peace of action. You need action. I'd have stopped writing years ago if it were for the money.

You're always learning. The problem is, sometimes you stop and think you understand the world. This is not correct. The world is always moving. You never reach the point you can stop making an effort.

The more in harmony with yourself you are, the more joyful you are and the more faithful you are. Faith is not to disconnect you from reality - it connects you to reality.

You have to take risks. We will only understand the miracle of life fully when we allow the unexpected to happen.

Life was always a matter of waiting for the right moment to act.

It's easy to be famous today. People pay a million dollars to be recognized, but nobody cares about them. They cared about me because I did things other men were afraid to do. That's why my fans identified with me. They were mostly working-class.

You can be famous for a lot of things. You can be a Nobel-prize winner. You can be the fattest guy in the world.

If you fall during your life, it doesn't matter. You're never a failure as long as you try to get up.

I love the feeling of the fresh air on my face and the wind blowing through my hair.

I like to help kids, work with kids in detention homes. Don't tell a kid what's right and wrong. He knows what's right and wrong. Find out what his attitude and his aptitude are; try to help him where he wants to go.

If you don't know about pain and trouble, you're in sad shape. They make you appreciate life.

I can still crack a safe with one hand tied behind my back. I'm not proud of it. But I was always against society.

I really think we should pass a law in every state, I don't care whether it takes the independence away from an old person or not. You shouldn't be driving a car if you're over the age of 80. Maybe even less than that.

You are the master of your own ship, pal. There are lots of people who fall into troubled waters and don't have the guts or the knowledge or the ability to make it to shore. They have nobody to blame but themselves.

Women are the root of all evil. I ought to know. I'm Evel.

I decided to fly through the air and live in the sunlight and enjoy life as much as I could.

Failure is instructive. The person who really thinks learns quite as much from his failures as from his successes.

Arriving at one goal is the starting point to another.

The belief that all genuine education comes about through experience does not mean that all experiences are genuinely or equally educative.

Education is not preparation for life; education is life itself.

Education, therefore, is a process of living and not a preparation for future living.

To find out what one is fitted to do, and to secure an opportunity to do it, is the key to happiness.

Such happiness as life is capable of comes from the full participation of all our powers in the endeavor to wrest from each changing situations of experience its own full and unique meaning.

Every great advance in science has issued from a new audacity of imagination.