When speech is divorced from speaker and word from meaning, what is left is just ritual, language as ritual.

Let's just say that global warming deniers are now on a par with Holocaust deniers.

I have never been especially impressed by the heroics of people convinced they are about to change the world. I am more awed by those who struggle to make one small difference.

Most people do not consider dawn to be an attractive experience - unless they are still up.

Maybe this year, we ought to walk through the rooms of our lives not looking for flaws, but looking for potential.

The central struggle of parenthood is to let our hopes for our children outweigh our fears.

I regard this novel as a work without redeeming social value, unless it can be recycled as a cardboard box.

What he labels sexual, she labels harassment.

Today, much of journalism and politics are in a kind of collusion to oversimplify and personalize issues. No room for ambivalence. Plenty of room for the personal attack.

Ultimately, time is all you have and the idea isn't to save it, but to savour it.

Our 'mistakes' become our crucial parts, sometimes our best parts, of the lives we have made.

There is no greatness where there is not simplicity, goodness, and truth.

Vanity is becoming a nuisance, I can see why women give it up, eventually. But I'm not ready for that yet.

Doubt, fear and regret are the three villains of success. However, if you close the door on the first two, you will never have to worry about meeting the third.

You have to have an attitude that nothing's gonna stop me. I think that's just my New York kind of attitude - survival of the fittest.

Most important, for openers, work six hours a day, seven days a week for six years. Then if you like it you can get serious about it.

There is so much oil now in the Gulf of Mexico, and you can thank the folks of British Petroleum for this, so much oil in the Gulf, you can now park on it.

I think it's an urgent plea for us all to sit down together.

We ought at all times to be very careful that high-mindedness shall never have place in our hearts.

Time does not act on memory to soften the edges, blur the details; if anything, it sharpens them. Emotions may lose their acid outlines, but not places and people, not if you wish to retain them.

We need a race to the top so that we have policies and regulations that protect human rights, the environment and that reduce poverty.