People move forward into the future out of the way they comprehend the past. When we don't understand something in our past, we are therefore crippled.

Writing books is the closest men ever come to childbearing.

A modern democracy is a tyranny whose borders are undefined; one discovers how far one can go only by traveling in a straight line until one is stopped.

The function of socialism is to raise suffering to a higher level.

Khomeini has offered us the opportunity to regain our frail religion ... faith in the power of words.

There was that law of life, so cruel and so just, that one must grow or else pay more for remaining the same.

Any war that requires the suspension of reason as a necessity for support is a bad war.

America is a hurricane, and the only people who do not hear the sound are those fortunate if incredibly stupid and smug White Protestants who live in the center, in the serene eye of the big wind.

I was thinking that surgeons had to be the happiest people on earth. To cut people up and get paid for it-that's happiness, I told myself.

Love asks us that we be a little braver than is comfortable, a little more generous, a little more flexible. It means living on the edge more than we care to.

Reaching consensus in a group is often confused with finding the right answer.

Failure makes Success more appreciable

Your clothes conceal much of your beauty, yet they hide not the unbeautiful.

Actually, the moment of victory is wonderful, but also sad. It means that your trip is ended.

No country is so peaceful as the one that leads into death. Life arches above one's head like a bridgespan, and below it flows the water, carries the boat, takes it further.

A story ... has a sturdy sense of itself of being built out of its own necessity, not just to shelter or beguile you.

I loved being in Close Encounters, just to watch Steven Spielberg working was exciting.

Pain plants the flag of truth within a rebel fortress.

By luck I mean, when opportunity meets preparation.

Forest, I fear you! In my ruined heart your roaring wakens the same agony as in cathedrals when the organ moans and from the depths I hear that I am damned.

When in God thou believest, near God thou wilt certainly be.