I pretended I had urgent business at the prosecutor's table which, in one of The System's obvious tells, was always millimeters from the jury box.

Intellectual discourse and investigation is admittedly great fun but only truly meaningful when conducted in the service of others.

There's a manner of speaking you use while lawyering. A manner as affected and rife with artifice as your average campaign speech, with a similar fear of offending.

Basal Ganglia casts an unsettling spell, but one that in its aphoristic intensity and lightning-flash insights into human loneliness and connection, achieves a genuine empathic wisdom.

Distance was a dangerous thing, she knew. Distance changed people.

A visionary is a leader of excellence who sees what others do not see, who achieves for now and plans for the future, who positively impacts different generations and raises up other visionaries.

Too bad for the storytellers. Too bad for the sense makers, the apologists, that nothing, then or ever, nothing was inevitable. It's just too bad.

Neil once told me you had to become a monster so that you didn't become the victim of one instead. I don't care what anyone says. I believe him.

It's terrifying, that unconditional love you have for a child. I still wonder if she really came from me, from my womb. It's a miracle. I don't understand it. I live it very intensely.

Newark might be one of few the places where the politics is tougher than even Brooklyn.

There is one way whereby we may secure our riches, and make sure friends to ourselves of them,--by laying them out in charity.

I'm tall and thin but not strong, so you're either an athlete or you're funny.

I'll be honest; I'm a student of fashion. I say that because I just wear what I feel. I'm not led by name brands and things like that.

If someone is very upper-class, you have a stereotype of him which is probably true. If someone has a working-class accent, you have no idea who you're talking to.