I wonder if a single thought that has helped forward the human spirit has ever been conceived or written down in an enormous room: except, perhaps, in the reading room of the British Museum.

A racist system inevitably destroys and damages human beings; it brutalizes and dehumanizes them, blacks and whites alike.

Children who are treated as if they are uneducable almost invariably become uneducable.

I believe in courtesy, the ritual by which we avoid hurting other people's feelings by satisfying our own egos.

Art...must do something more than give pleasure: it should relate to our own life so as to increase our energy of spirit.

A lot of people you think you know you don't know until you find out you don't know then it may be too late to know.

Over and above the political, economic, sociological, and international implications of racial prejudices, their major significance is that they place unnecessary burdens upon human beings.

The eye instinctively looks for analogies and amplifies them, so that a face imagined in the pattern of a wallpaper may become more vivid than a photograph.

Almost all great painters in old age arrive at the same kind of broad, simplified style, as if they wanted to summarise the whole of their experience in a few strokes and blobs of colour.

Pride, like humility, is destroyed by one's insistence that he possesses it.

The Cathedrals were built to the glory of God; New York was built to the glory of Mammon.

My earliest influences were Coco Chanel and Yves Saint Laurent.

If I eat, I can't work. I'll eat when I'm dead.

Adam and Eve ate the first vitamins, including the package.

I'm a lousy predictor of the future.

The next MVP of the Super Bowl is just as likely to have been a full-time grocery store bagger last year as a Heisman Trophy winner.

You do know the answers to most of your problems. Somewhere deep inside, you know.

Storytelling draws on the magic of language to created Elsewheres. Writers use a linguistic sleight-of-hand to take an attribute, attach them to new objects, and create enchantment.

I think the penalties are grossly unfair. I think it's borderline shameful.

Any living cell carries with it the experience of a billion years of experimentation by its ancestors.

What is it, I wonder, that makes two people suddenly become important to each other? So important that everything else around them just fades away?