God grant me the serenity to accept that people are ignorant, the courage to uphold the law when I'm hostile, & the wisdom to realize that murder is illegal.

The best way to appreciate your job is to imagine yourself without one.

Be yourself; everyone else is already taken.

Always forgive your enemies nothing annoys them so much.

It is better to have a permanent income than to be fascinating.

Everyone may not be good, but there's always something good in everyone. Never judge anyone shortly because every saint has a past and every sinner has a future.

To live is the rarest thing in the world. Most people exist, that is all.

Be yourself; everyone else is taken.

Women are made to be loved, not understood.

Some cause happiness wherever they go; others, whenever they go.

I am so clever that sometimes I don't understand a single word of what I am saying.

Basically, I believe the world is a jungle, and if it's not a bit of a jungle in the home, a child cannot possibly be fit to enter the outside world.

Libraries are about books. Books have no color. And they don't care who reads them.

We may eventually come to realize that chastity is no more a virtue than malnutrition.

NBC's The West Wing is an icon for bad stories; Gitmo is a place where we keep an eye on evil, dangerous people who want to kill us.

Some people believe God is involved in every little decision we make. Some people believe you're given the free will to make the decisions. Sometimes people believe God is not involved at all.

People have an idea that one is in control of a career, a lot more than you really are. You can engineer things to an extent. But you are at the mercy of what comes in across the desk.

To write anything tolerable, the mind must be in a natural, proper disposition; provocatives, in that case, as well as in another,will only produce miserable, abortive performances.

... for it is the small temptations which undermine integrity unless we watch and pray and never think them too trivial to be resisted.

In contrast to New Orleans, there was only minimal looting after the horrendous 1995 earthquake in Kobe, Japan - because, when you get down to it, Japanese aren't blacks.

I was lucky. My father raced bikes. He gave me the passion very early. I had my first bike when I was three or four years old.