“I’m not really concerned about boundaries. I just follow my conscience and my heart. Follow your heart. That’s what I do. Compassion is something I have a lot of, because I’ve been through a lot of pain in my life. Anybody who has suffered a lot of pain has a lot of compassion.”

“There’s unconditional love there. You hear that phrase a lot but it’s real with me and her [June Carter]. She loves me in spite of everything, in spite of myself. She has saved my life more than once. She’s always been there with her love, and it has certainly made me forget the pain for a long time, many times. When it gets dark and everybody’s gone home and the lights are turned off, it’s just me and her.”

“This morning, with her, having coffee. [his description of paradise]”

“The battle against the dark one, and the clinging to the right one, is what my life is about.”

“There’s no more simple life with simple choices for the young.”

“Life is rough so you gotta be tough.”

“Just like becoming an expert in wine–you learn by drinking it, the best you can afford–you learn about great food by finding the best there is, whether simply or luxurious.”

“No-one is born a great cook, one learns by doing.”

“Always remember: if you’re alone in the kitchen and you drop the lamb, you can always just pick it up. Who’s going to know?”

“I enjoy cooking with wine. Sometimes I even put it in the food.”

“Between two worlds life hovers like a star, twixt night and morn, upon the horizon’s verge.”

“People don’t realize how a man’s whole life can be changed by one book.”

“You’re not to be so blind with patriotism that you can’t face reality. Wrong is wrong, no matter who does it or says it.”

“My alma mater was books, a good library. I could spend the rest of my life reading, just satisfying my curiosity.”

“Early in life I had learned that if you want something, you had better make some noise.”

“Plan your work for today and every day, then work your plan.”

“Left-wing zealots have often been prepared to ride roughshod over due process and basic considerations of fairness when they think they can get away with it. For them the ends always seems to justify the means. That is precisely how their predecessors came to create the gulag.”

“The facts of life are conservative.”

“We should all start to live before we get too old. Fear is stupid. So are regrets.”

“For life: it is rather a determination not to be overwhelmed. For work: the truth can only be recalled, never invented.”

“You never know what life is like, until you have lived it.”

“Its not too much fun to know yourself too well or think you do — everyone needs a little conceit to carry them through and past the falls.”

“I have always been deeply terrified to really be someone’s wife since I know from life one cannot love another, ever, really.”

Once you expose your private life, if you give one little bit, the floodgates are open and everyone's got a free range for you.