If you're being attacked from all sides, it's possible you're doing something right; it's also possible that you are doing everything wrong.

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.

Never shall a young man, Thrown into despairBy those great honey-colouredRamparts at your ear, Love you for yourself aloneAnd not your yellow hair.

It's sad how people want to see us females go against each other. Never been for that. Never will.

You don't have to fight to straighten the image of your country: You have to straighten the country. You must speak about problems openly.

I don't want to paint a picture of total gloom and doom.

When the words come, they are merely empty shells without the music. They live as they are sung, for the words are the body and the music the spirit.

I think e-mail petitions are an illusion. It gives people the illusion that they're participating in some meaningful political action.

What nature creates has eternity in it.

Vengeance is disappointing, always.

In a sick world even the hale are sick.

We may be willing to tell a story twice, never to hear it more than once.