If I can create some space that people haven't experienced before and if it stays with them or gives them a dream for the future that's the kind of structure I seek to create.

When I wonder what the future of books will be I often think about horses. Before automobiles existed everyone had a horse. Then cars became available and their convenience compared to horses was undeniable.

Our work is before us. It cannot be passed to future legislatures and must not be passed to future generations. May we boldly seize the moment with singular unity. And may we build a Texas of unlimited possibility.

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.

The trouble with the future is that is usually arrives before we're ready for it.

The mind is never satisfied with the objects immediately before it but is always breaking away from the present moment and losing itself in schemes of future felicity... The natural flights of the human mind are not from pleasure to pleasure but from hope to hope.

The future enters into us in order to transform itself in us long before it happens.

My wish for the new millennium is for all children... to grow up wiser and stronger and more prosperous for the future than ever before.

So what I do now is to pre-empt that by making the up into a virtue and telling funny stories about how crap I am before people have a chance to notice it for themselves and think maybe I haven't realised.

I had seen movies before that that had made me laugh but I had never seen anything even remotely close to as funny as Richard Pryor was just standing there talking.