Quotes on Stuff

We only need so much to survive, but this world we live in tells us we need more stuff to be happy. We're inundated with our televisions, the Internet and advertising that says in order to be happy you have to have these things. When you say, 'Gimme, gimme, gimme,' you will always be in short supply.

Something I try to instill in others is to just be a good person. It's a decision you make a million times a day. But if you just keep trying, good stuff comes to you in an ordained way.

The reason you do this stuff - comedy, plays, movies - is to be seized by something, to disappear in the service of an idea.

Your children are grown and your career has slowed down - all the stuff that took up so much attention is gone, and you're left with expansive time and space. You have to reimagine who you are and what life is about.

Emotions can certainly be misleading: they can fool you into believing stuff that is definitely, demonstrably untrue. Yet emotions are also our indispensable tool for navigating, for feeling our way through, the much larger domain of stuff that isn't susceptible to proof or disproof, that isn't checkable against the physical universe.

The Tao teaches us to let go of things. Use the 80/20 rule. If you take all your clothes, you'll find out that you only wear 20 percent of them. Take what you have and don't use and circulate it. Give stuff to people who truly need it. After all, we come into this world with nothing; we leave this world with nothing.

Some of the stuff I do on the court is what most people think they can do.

Kids should be allowed to break stuff more often. That's a consequence of exploration. Exploration is what you do when you don't know what you're doing. That's what scientists do every day.

It's not that I sit down and write great stuff without thinking, not at all. Most of it is terrible. But the stuff that feels fun and fresh to me tends to happen fairly unthinkingly.

As for my stuff, I'm just doing guest verses for other people's records. I try to stay recording, because if I don't, I get rusty.

Even when I wasn't doing much 'science for the public' stuff, I found that four or five hours of intense work in physics was all my brain could take on a given day.

I just realized at least what I was doing was making a lot of stuff that nobody needed and pushing a consumerist society. So I went to do something else.

I personally don't believe people really grow. They just learn stuff when they were a kid, and hold on to it, and that affects every relationship they have.

I'd listen to all the stuff that was going on around me and drift off into my fantasies about it. My fantasies have fuelled all the songs I've ever written.

When I look at a lot of older stuff that I've written, I think one sign of amateur humor writing is when you see people trying too hard.

The individual stats, that stuff is fun, but it doesn't last. Somebody else is gonna come along and break your records. But the memories that you take are forever.

For a long time, I thought when you do a box set, you're giving up; you're saying, 'OK, I don't have anything left.' But now I've listened to some of the old stuff I haven't heard in 20 to 40 years with fresh ears. It's like, 'Oh yeah, I can see where people might want to to hear some of this stuff that didn't make it onto the records.'

I remember making 'Mr. Show,' thinking, 'Man this stuff is really funny to me.' I don't know if anyone else will love it, but I know I'm going to still watch it in 15 years if I'm still alive and laugh really hard. Even though we had very high standards, we were trying to excite and please ourselves.

I'll stop when I think I'm not doing good stuff. I'll never exploit something just because people like it.

Test matches to me are the caviar compared to the fast food stuff. Having the ability and the constitution to triumph over five days is what it's all about.

The thing you don't dream about as a kid is all the peripheral stuff that comes with success.