In bookstores, my stuff is usually filed in the out-of-the-way, additional interest sections.

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.

Money can't buy happiness but it can buy a huge yacht that sails right next to it.

But there's nothing wrong with being scared. I think everyone's a little scared. Even the government.

Who soweth good seed shall surely reap The year grows rich as it groweth old And life's latest sands are its sands of gold!

In the end, long life is the reward, strength, and beauty.

We have always felt the sympathy of the world, but we would prefer the respect of the world to sympathy without respect.

To be alone is to be free, and freedom was the only happiness accessible to my nature.

The hand of fate had dipped into the ragbag of humanity.

Social engaged intellectuals must accept reality as they found it and shape it toward positive social goals, not stand aside in self-righteous isolation.

Will the people in the cheaper seats clap your hands? And the rest of you, if you'll just rattle your jewelry.

It's a skill that I worked all my life, and it's been taken away. That's kind of tough to take.