"Set goals for things you can control. In my case, I can't control the marks from the judges, but I can control how I train every day, and I can control my performance."

“The only absolute morality is absolute stagnation.”

“Even as she'd been writing it, she wondered if she was using too many exclamation marks, but she was glad she left them in. Nothing says "all is good in the world" like exclamation marks, after all.”

“And often the worst thing wasn't the victims--they were dead, after all, and beyond any more pain. The worst thing was those who loved them and survived them. Often the walking dead from now on, shell-shocked, hearts ruptured, stumbling through the remainder of their lives without anything left inside of them but blood and organs, impervious to pain, having learned nothing except that the worst things did, in fact, sometimes happen. (Mystic River)”

“Men will let you abuse them if only you will make them laugh.”

“On the whole I prefer cats to women because cats seldom if ever use the word 'relationship'.”

“Yes, I love to play drums and bass and guitar and piano. Those are the main instruments I play. That is it.”

Source : "Conversations With Electric Light Orchestra’s Jeff Lynne, The Monkees’ Micky Dolenz and The Rippingtons’ Russ Freeman". Interview with Mike Ragogna, www.huffingtonpost.com. October 19, 2012.

“This is what I think art is and what I demand of it: that it pull everyone in, that it show one person another's most intimate thoughts and feelings, that it throw open the window of the soul.”

“For truly in nature there are many operations that are far more than mechanical. Nature is not simply an organic body like a clock, which has no vital principle of motion in it; but it is a living body which has life and perception, which are much more exalted than a mere mechanism or a mechanical motion.”