Be thou the rainbow in the storms of life. The evening beam that smiles the clouds away and tints tomorrow with prophetic ray.

Life is made up of sobs sniffles and smiles with sniffles predominating.

Life isn't a matter of milestones but of moments.

Even after such milestones as Kathryn Bigelow winning an Oscar there still seem to be few women in leadership roles.

The increase of scientific knowledge lies not only in the occasional milestones of science but in the efforts of the very large body of men who with love and devotion observe and study nature.

'Avatar' is the greatest most comprehensive collection of movie cliches ever assembled but it's put together in a brand new way with a new technology and tremendous imagination making it a true epic and a kind of a milestone.

True humor springs not more from the head than from the heart. It is not contempt its essence is love. It issues not in laughter but in still smiles which lie far deeper.

For me Barack Obama's election was a milestone of the most extraordinary kind. On the day he was elected I felt such hope in my heart. I thought we were seeing the beginning of a new era of equal opportunity across race and gender such as America had never known before.

Ah Hope! what would life be stripped of thy encouraging smiles that teach us to look behind the dark clouds of today for the golden beams that are to gild the morrow.

I think because my life is so insane and it's constantly going at 120 miles per hour my favorite thing to do is sit at home in front of the TV and check out.

When I came home for the summer after my first year of college I told my mother that my best friend and I were driving to California. She laughed out loud - 2 000 miles in a what? Well my best friend had an old Chevy. What could go wrong?

I bought a Yamaha-1 and I was doing 180 miles per hour home on the 405 and that's really really crazy but I did it.

I came home every Friday afternoon riding the six miles on the back of a big mule. I spent Saturday and Sunday washing and ironing and cooking for the children and went back to my country school on Sunday afternoon.

We are not about to send American boys 9 or 10 thousand miles away from home to do what Asian boys ought to be doing for themselves.

I am a leader. Leaders always get heat. They're always going against the grain. Jimi Hendrix got heat Bob Marley got heat Miles Davis got heat. Every great artist got heat. Heat means you're doing something right.

Life is made up not of great sacrifices or duties but of little things in which smiles and kindness and small obligations given habitually are what preserve the heart and secure comfort.

Do the difficult things while they are easy and do the great things while they are small. A journey of a thousand miles must begin with a single step.

I got a poster from Columbia Records and there's Miles Davis Charlie Mingus Ellington Count Basie - everybody in that poster has died I'm the only one left. And great players like Paul Desmond and Gerry Mulligan it's hard to believe they're gone because we were all so close. But I believe in the future and the tradition will go on.

I look forward to a time in the not so distant future when we no longer look forward to 'firsts' as milestones women have yet to achieve but we look back on them as historic events that continue to teach and inspire.

Smiles form the channels of a future tear.

My grandmother started walking five miles a day when she was sixty. She's ninety-seven now and we don't know where the hell she is.

We don't really go in for big family dinners but Scottish people are famously confrontational. It's a cultural thing so maybe we don't need to have them to clear the air. Also traditional family food isn't as nice here so there's no payoff for traveling hundreds of miles.

People see you onstage and the glamorous side but they don't see you traveling 600 miles a night eating truck stop food and spending by yourself staring at walls.

Now I say that if you run more than 15 miles a week it's for something other than aerobic fitness. Once you pass 15 miles you do not see much further improvement.