I spoke in front of a huge gathering in Seattle, and someone got up and said, "I'm just so afraid." I said, "The only way not to be afraid is to join with other people who are also afraid."

I'm particularly committed to the political people who needed defense. I understand that they're fighting a bigger war than just, "Let me go get some money for cocaine tonight."

My anti-authoritarian instincts let me directly to criminal defense work.

The only way not to be afraid is to join with other people who are also afraid.

Lawyering is very individualistic. There are lawyers who are going to be that persistent birddog, they're never going to give up on the client, they're going to defend people.

I would never defend a cop - though I did on a few private cases, when cops were acting not as cops but as private citizens.

The only thing we have is each other.

If you make a mistake as a prosecutor, your mistakes go home, whereas if you make a mistake defending, they go to jail.

Your goal is to make a better world through the work you do. It's not always possible, and you have to earn a living.

You're working not for the corporate interest, not for the government interest, not for your own self-interest. You have a higher calling.

I took anything that came across my doorstep. I started getting a reputation.

The only point in creating something is to watch it die. Like a story that must come to a climax, what I have done will not be fulfilled until the end has arrived.

It's hopeless! Tomorrow there'll be even more books I should have read than there are today.

The biggest challenge for any craft person or artist is to accept the constraints of their medium and make something beautiful despite them. That's kind of fun, actually.

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.

In dim eclipse, disastrous twilight sheds On half the nations, and with fear of change Perplexes monarchs.

Perhaps the immobility of the things that surround us is forced upon them by our conviction that they are themselves, and not anything else, and by the immobility of our conceptions of them.

If we are kind and considerate, people will want to be around us, and we benefit from enduring circles of attention and care.

I want to have complete control over every media so that when I make my record I put on it what I want to put on it. Not what society wants me to put on it.

A face which is always serene possesses a mysterious and powerful attraction: sad hearts come to it as to the sun to warm themselves again.