Every few years something new breaks into the circle of my thoughts.

Pain narrows consciousness; pleasure blurs it.

When Medusa looks in the mirror, she sees the Lady of Sorrows.

My passions have never jumped out of the fireplace and set fire to the carpet.

Retirement requires the invention of a new hedonism, not a return to the hedonism of youth

The sewing machine joins what the scissors have cut asunder, plus whatever else comes in its path.

Clothes make a statement. Costumes tell a story.

The laughter of the aphorism is sometimes triumphant, but seldom carefree.

'Be faithful to your roots' is the liberal version of 'Stay in your ghetto.'

Every day begins with an act of courage and hope: getting out of bed.

Totem poles and wooden masks no longer suggest tribal villages but fashionable drawing rooms in New York and Paris.

... despite the profound advances in molecular biology oer the past half-century, we still do not understand what life is, how it relates to the inanimate world, and how it emerged.

I keep telling you that feeling is not selective. You can't feel pain, you aren't gonna feel anything else either.

Is it not enough to dip your tongue into my soul and write poetry?

Good Samaritan is only good when they think no one else will be the Good Samaritan.

memory is so selective; wishful thinking presses it into service all the time.

It is not God's will merely that we should be happy, but that we should make ourselves happy

Even when I was No. 1 in the world, I was taking it one match at a time. I never was a player to look too far ahead, the way draws can pan out.

The natural flights of the human mind are not from pleasure to pleasure, but from hope to hope.

He whom the sages have been seeking in all these places is in our own hearts; the voice that you heard was right, says Vedanta, but the direction you gave to the voice was wrong.

Their memory's like a train: you can see it getting smaller as it pulls away And the things you can't remember Tell the things you can't forget that History puts a saint in every dream.