I'm deeply and passionately involved in the design process. I'm a brash American, and if my name is going to be on something, I'm going to have my say.

It is a fine seasoning for joy to think of those we love.

Some of the most famous books are the least worth reading. Their fame was due to their having done something that needed to be doing in their day. The work is done and the virtue of the book has expired.

We die only once, and for such a long time.

The greater the obstacle, the more glory in overcoming it.

All the ills of mankind, all the tragic misfortunes that fill the history books, all the political blunders, all the failures of the great leaders have arisen merely from a lack of skill at dancing.

Love is often the fruit of marriage.

Books and marriage go ill together.

A wise man is superior to any insults which can be put upon him, and the best reply to unseemly behavior is patience and moderation.

The trees that are slow to grow bear the best fruit.

A lover tries to stand in well with the pet dog of the house.

There are pretenders to piety as well as to courage.

If you suppress grief too much, it can well redouble.

The duty of comedy is to correct men by amusing them.

One should eat to live, not live to eat.

I used to know Jennifer Love Hewitt. We lived in the same apartment building when I was about... jeez, I guess it was when I was doing 'Christmas Vacation', so I was about 13 or 14.

I'm still a Chicagoan in the fact that I can't do Christmas with sand and palm trees. It just doesn't compute - it's not Christmas unless your face hurts when you step outside.

My Christmas present to myself each year is to see how much air travel can open up the world and take me to places as far from sheltered California and Japan as possible.

I can still remember the afternoon, on my 15th birthday, when I opened up 'The Virgin and the Gypsy,' D.H. Lawrence's novella, in my tiny cell in boarding school, and whole worlds of possibility opened out that I had never guessed existed. The language was on fire and sang of liberation.

If we do away with semi-colons, parentheses and much else, we will lose all music, nuance and subtlety in communication - and end up shouting at one another in block capitals.

Contractions, 'U' for 'you' and the like are wonderful to make communication brief and efficient - but we wouldn't want all our talk to be only brief and efficient. Taking pauses out of language would be like taking the net away from a tennis game. Where would all the fun go?

I've never meditated in my life. I don't practice yoga nor any religion. I'm a tourist on the realm of stillness.

The one thing perhaps that technology hasn't always given us is a sense of how to make the wisest use of technology.

Travel for me is all about transformation, and I'm fascinated by those people who really do come back from a trip unrecognizable to themselves and perhaps open to the same possibilities they'd have written off not a month before.

For more and more of us, home has really less to do with a piece of soil than, you could say, with a piece of soul. If somebody suddenly asks me, 'Where's your home?' I think about my sweetheart or my closest friends or the songs that travel with me wherever I happen to be.

Travel, for me, is a little bit like being in love because suddenly, all your senses are at the setting marked 'on.' Suddenly, you're alert to the secret patterns of the world.

It takes courage, of course, to step out of the fray, as it takes courage to do anything that's necessary, whether tending to a loved one on her deathbed or turning away from that sugarcoated doughnut.

Nearly everybody I know does something to try to remove herself to clear her head and to have enough time and space to think... All of us instinctively feel that something inside us is crying out for more spaciousness and stillness to offset the exhilarations of this movement and the fun and diversion of the modern world.

In many a piece of music, it's the pause or the rest that gives the piece its beauty and its shape. And I know I, as a writer, will often try to include a lot of empty space on the page so that the reader can complete my thoughts and sentences and so that her imagination has room to breathe.

I sometimes think that so much of our life takes place inside our heads - in memory or imagination or interpretation or speculation - that if I really want to change my life, I might best begin by changing my mind.

If you had a Ministry box set under your Christmas tree, wrapped in paper, 'From Beer to Eternity' is the bow that goes around the present, you know what I mean?

I was stupid when I started: the epitome of bright-eyed and bushy-tailed. It was like, 'I get to live in L.A. and drive around in limos? Really?' I didn't realize I was owned. The more money gets pumped into you, the more you become a marionette. It made me a true redneck in attitude: I never wanted to wake up ever again feeling owned.

Artists don't make objects. Artists make mythologies.

One can hardly be Indian and not know that almost every accent, which hand you eat your food with, has some deeper symbolic truth, reality.

Sculpture occupies the same space as your body.

I am Indian, and I'm proud of it. Indian life is mythologically rich and powerful.

If you know somethin' well, you can always paint it but people would be better off buyin' chickens.

A strange thing is memory, and hope; one looks backward, and the other forward; one is of today, the other of tomorrow. Memory is history recorded in our brain, memory is a painter, it paints pictures of the past and of the day.

I look back on my life like a good day's work, it was done and I am satisfied with it.

Life is what we make it, always has been, always will be.

Comparing 'Christmas Vacation' to 'It's A Wonderful Life' is the silliest thing. That film starred the greatest movie actor of all time, and the idea that our movie could ever be connected in some fashion to something so brilliant and beautiful always made feel like, 'That's all they had to write about?'

Frank Capra's grandson was a second Assistant Director on 'Christmas Vacation.'

Nobody prepares you for what happens when you get famous, and I didn't handle it well.

Once I got married and had kids, I moved away from romantic roles, because it seemed wrong to have my three-year-old wondering why Daddy was kissing someone else.

I was always the guy getting kicked out of my classes at school for having an attitude problem.

Chaplin was my idol. I remember watching those movies at this little theater in Woodstock, N.Y., when I was probably 6 and laughing so hard at the surprises, like Keaton suddenly being dragged by a streetcar.

Parrots make great pets. They have more personality than goldfish.

All my children inherited perfect pitch.

What's funny is funny. The same thing that made you laugh a hundred years ago makes you laugh now.

You could knock my teeth out and break my nose, and there'd be something funny about it to me.