When I meet people who say - which they do all of the time - 'I must just tell you my great aunt had cancer of the elbow and the doctors gave her 10 seconds to live but last I heard she was climbing Mount Everest ' and so forth I switch off quite early.

What distinguishes a great artist from a weak one is first their sensibility and tenderness second their imagination and third their industry.

In my second year in graduate school I took a computer course and that was like lightening striking.

For a country to have a great writer is like having a second government. That is why no regime has ever loved great writers only minor ones.

Whether Canada ends up as o-ne national government or two national governments or several national governments or some other kind of arrangement is quite frankly secondary in my opinion.

You know why there's a Second Amendment? In case the government fails to follow the first one.

The second office in the government is honorable and easy the first is but a splendid misery.

I'm not in the leftist controlled Rock and Roll Hall of Fame because of my political views primarily my lifelong militant support of the NRA the Second Amendment and my belief that the only good bad guy is a dead bad guy.

I don't think it's a good advert for any restaurant a fat chef and secondly who wants to eat a dessert when the chef's a fat pig.

Love seeks one thing only: the good of the one loved. It leaves all the other secondary effects to take care of themselves. Love therefore is its own reward.

There are three kinds of intelligence: one kind understands things for itself the other appreciates what others can understand the third understands neither for itself nor through others. This first kind is excellent the second good and the third kind useless.

First I have to thank God for giving me the gift that he did as well as a second chance for a better life.

Woman was God's second mistake.

Someday after mastering the winds the waves the tides and gravity we shall harness for God the energies of love and then for a second time in the history of the world man will have discovered fire.

God gave you a gift of 86 400 seconds today. Have you used one to say 'thank you?'

We kinda look at this as the second or third chapter of our lives. After college most people figure out what they want to do with their lives. But we already know what we want to do in the future and that is to continue to further our business goals.

The action films I will make in the future will be more believable and character-based. I am now on my second cycle of fame and I want to make films that smell real and are truthful.

On Australia Day 2010 as we enter this second decade of the 21st century Australians can be optimistic about our future but we cannot afford to mistake optimism for complacency.

You mustn't take what I say as gospel because no one can second-guess the future.

You have to like the present if not your life becomes secondhand if you think it was better before. Or that it will be better in the future.

People are funny and in the most tragic situations when comedy erupts from nowhere it can turn on its head within the space of a second or a minute. You're laughing one minute and you're crying the next and that's just life for me and that is what people are like.

And regardless of the fact that in this country certainly in the arts we treat comedy as a second-class citizen I've never thought of it that way. I've always thought it to be important. The last time I looked the Greeks were holding up two masks. I've always thought of it not only as having equal value but as the craft of it being funny.

What's so great about working with really funny women is that vanity comes second. Whatever makes it real and funny they're going to go for and it's just great.

I'm on so late I'm definitely the last seconds of anyone's attention. So I just want to give them something dumb to laugh at so they go 'That's funny ' then fall asleep.