Human beings do not like being pushed about by gods. They may seem to, on the surface, but somewhere on the inside, underneath it all, they sense it, and they resent it.

Let's start a new tomorrow, today.

Eyes as black and as shiny as chips of obsidian stared back into his. They were eyes like black holes, letting nothing out, not even information.

His name is Marcus: he is four and a half and possesses that deep gravity and seriousness that only small children and mountain gorillas have ever been able to master.

Black as night, sweet as sin.

Everybody going to be dead one day, just give them time.

People take on the shapes of the songs and the stories that surround them, especially if they don't have their own song.

Stories are webs, interconnected strand to strand, and you follow each story to the center, because the center is the end. Each person is a strand of the story.

That's the trouble with you young people. You think because you ain't been here long, you know everything. In my life I already forgot more than you ever know.

The right song can turn an emperor into a laughingstock, can bring down dynasties.

Songs remain. They last...A song can last long after the events and the people in it are dust and dreams and gone. That's the power of songs.

Love is a combination of friendship, passion, and respect.

I hear they’re all infected with chlamydia, which just goes to show that you really can’t tell who’s got the clam. I mean, look at a picture of a koala…tell me you’re not shocked.

Work done is of more consequence for the future than the foresight of an angel.

As a graduate student, I wrote a long paper connecting the dots between mathematical models of learning and language development in children. It was published in a major journal.

You've seen the first issue and what happened in the last page. Some pretty awful stuff. I don't know why I seem to be very good at drawing it!

The question in my mind is how many additional American casualties is Saddam worth? And the answer is not very damned many.

I was raised in cities but I was raised in Texas, so there's a certain amount of connection to the earth.

The theater is the only institution in the world which has been dying for four thousand years and has never succumbed. It requires tough and devoted people to keep it alive.

A short time ago the demagogues blamed capitalism for the poverty of the masses. Today they rather blame capitalism for the "affluence" that it bestows upon the common man.

Time, that most abstract of humanity's homes.