I try to turn a written thing, when I'm in trouble with it, into a spoken thing: I start imagining what I would say to someone if I were trying to tell the story or make the argument.

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.

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

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.

I've learned .... That when you harbor bitterness, happiness will dock elsewhere.

There is nothing so nice as supposing. It's almost like being a fairy. If you suppose anything hard enough it seems as if it were real.

Why choose when you can have everything?

The inherent corruption of man can often bring down the best system.

People love advertising in particular but they hate advertising in general.

Love sees all; hate is blind.

In science we kill our hypothesis instead of each other.

Cajun culture is dying.

I believe destiny and hard work go hand in hand.

Well, anyway, I'm not a Catholic.