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

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.

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.

Over all, there are now more people under “correctional supervision” in America-more than six million-than were in the Gulag Archipelago under Stalin at its height.

How unlucky she was--born with adventurous hooves that were stuck inside a pen. But she wasn't giving up. If there was a way out, Flora said to herself, she would find it.

You get an image after you act in a film, but it is not necessary that you last long because of that image.

There's no place you can go on the prairie that you don't hear the white noise of the wind, steady and rough as surf curling along a non-existant shore.

I'm glad the Cube is reaching new generations, who face it with fresh wonder, curiosity and enthusiasm.

I would just have a different policy than what he has espoused... We need to recognize we are not going to deport 12 million people, and ... we shouldn't.

Don’t stand up when you can sit down and don’t sit down when you can lie down.

Before doing any interviews I like to know who I'm meeting with and get a bit of an idea of their sensibilities.

If you cannot catch a bird of paradise, better take a wet hen.

Even the slowest guy can go from first to third and help win a ballgame.

Look if you like, but you will have to leap.