Dinner with water is dinner for prisoners

After all, spinning is its own reward. There wouldn't be carousels if it weren't so.

The scale and the brutality of our prisons are the moral scandal of American life.

We breathe in our first language, and swim in our second.

The special virtue of freedom is not that it makes you richer and more powerful but that it gives you more time to understand what it means to be alive.

The loneliness of the expatriate is of an odd and complicated kind, for it is inseparable from the feeling of being free, of having escaped.

Frauds master our minds; magicians, like poets and lovers, engage them in a permanent maze of possibilities.

What drives innovation is abundance and ease, not the pressure of scarcity.

Sometimes having a good time can be the outward evidence of a deep re-thinking.

Wit and puns aren't just décor in the mind; they're essential signs that the mind knows it's on, recognizes its own software, can spot the bugs in its own program.

Fanaticism comes in as many flavors as there are human beings.

Getting up early and feeling awake was the one skill he had never truly perfected - he got up, of course, but it never felt natural.

What is hell other than a realm in which unholiness works without restraint in body and soul?

I've reached a point in my life where going to the supermarket is a day out.

I hate caviar. Ugh! The freebase of food!

Last word in lonesome is me.

And what I've found over time is that for me to write a poem that I think is worthy that I can live with, two things have to happen.

There is no virtue in penance and fasting which waste the body; they are only fanatical and monkish.

I trust two people, myself and the other is not you, its God

To lead a country, you must periodically hold a national consultation in which people representing different programmes can make a bid for power.

Yet no one hears his own remarks as prose.