To me living in the present means being aware of your conscious choice to focus on the past present or future - it is not necessarily having to focus on the present.

Of present fame think little and of future less the praises that we receive after we are buried like the flowers that are strewed over our grave may be gratifying to the living but they are nothing to the dead.

Most people are prisoners thinking only about the future or living in the past. They are not in the present and the present is where everything begins.

People who live in the past generally are afraid to compete in the present. I've got my faults but living in the past is not one of them. There's no future in it.

No valid plans for the future can be made by those who have no capacity for living now.

Once I knew only darkness and stillness... my life was without past or future... but a little word from the fingers of another fell into my hand that clutched at emptiness and my heart leaped to the rapture of living.

It's funny but we were living on this small island off the coast of Charleston South Carolina when I was 9.

I was making my living from a joke about my appearance that I didn't understand and in a way still don't because when I look in a mirror it doesn't seem funny to me.

When I was a little kid I wrote this play about all these characters living in a haunted house. There was a witch who lived there and a mummy. When they were all hassling him this guy who bought the house - I can't believe I remember this - he said to them 'Who's paying the mortgage on this haunted house?' I thought that was really funny.

I used to sell furniture for a living. The trouble was it was my own.