The issue is jobs. You can't get away from it: jobs. Having a buck or two in your pocket and feeling like somebody.

How come you don't work fourteen hours a day? Your great-great-grandparents did. How come you only work the eight-hour day? Four guys got hanged fighting for the eight-hour day for you.

People are hungry for stories. It's part of our very being. Storytelling is a form of history, of immortality too. It goes from one generation to another. -Studs Terkel

Most of us have jobs that are too small for our spirits.

Perhaps it is this specter that most haunts working men and women: the planned obsolescence of people that is of a piece with the planned obsolescence of the things they make. Or sell.

I want people to talk to one another no matter what their difference of opinion might be.

We are living in the United States of Alzheimer's. A whole country has lost its memory. When it can't remember yesterday, a country forgets what it once wanted to be.

Hope never trickles down. It always springs up.

Ordinary people are capable of doing extraordinary things, and that's what it's all about. They must count.

I've always felt, in all my books, that there's a deep decency in the American people and a native intelligence - providing they have the facts, providing they have the information.

More and more we are into communications; and less and less into communication.

Sometimes it's better to stop trying to make sense of things. Life isn't clear cut, there are always gray areas.

Time was when education moved toward soil, not away from it.

That's where all good music comes from, I think - anything that's likely to have an impact on pop culture comes from a point where there's no expectation of it becoming anything other than personal.

No war by any nation in any age has ever been declared by the people.

I do love secondhand books that open to the page some previous owner read oftenest.

Maybe it was me," Grandma said."Sometimes they sneak out.Did I fart?

Scars crossed her welded wrists.

Better not to give in to it.

Sometimes when you're editing a movie, you have the thing that you don't expect - which is you make it longer and longer as you go along.