A fierce hatred of embarrassment ruled a surprising amount of the life of Moses Malone, the Hall of Fame basketball center.

We have a name for the sum of grievances and compromises, this sheer normality of life lived among other people. We call it civilization. Culture, society, the workaday interactions of ordinary time.

Anything that keeps old words in circulation is to be treasured, the French revolution be damned.

(Dune's Frank) Herbert made religion the inescapable instrument of cultural change.

People who are easily embarrassed – those who blush too often and too soon – usually end up retreating from excellence.

The Ten Commandments, for example, were no more challenging than the Girl Scout oath, and why should anyone be tempted to put one false god ahead of another?

You can do good work simply staying up all night and eating nothing but junk food, but probably not in the long term.

My mom didn't want us to go to the candy house, she didn't want us to go to the ice cream truck, she didn't want us to go to the... There was actually a donut truck, if that makes sense.

The Church is the Church only when it exists for others.

I have some sarcastic sides of me.

The practice of meditation is emptying the mind. When the mind is empty, completely empty, it's perfect meditation. It's really that simple.

A boxer must exercise and develop every part of his body.

For me, the new pictures are what I'm thinking about every day. The past is the past, no? Every day is a new challenge.

New York was big enough and wide enough that it allowed for reasonably eccentric people like me to thrive. It was a perfect place for me.

Ships are but boards, sailors but men; there be land-rats and water-rats, water-thieves and land-thieves, I mean pirates, and thenthere is the peril of waters, winds, and rocks.