With the pride of the artist you must blow against the walls of every power that exists the small trumpet of your defiance.

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.

I don't have a command for 'stop wagging your tail'.

It is better to be violent if there is violence in our hearts than to put on the cloak of non-violence to cover impotence.

I dwell in possibility.

Those who cannot live fully often become destroyers of life.

I didn't know then that I would never be able to leave the sounds and smells of these sights behind me, but I was fiercely conscious of one thing-my ambition.

I miss good old-fashioned honorable people just trying to make something of life. Simply, without hurting anyone else. I know that makes me a sap.

You take the constructive criticism, because without the fans you would have no show.

Many ordinary Americans make themselves feel better by saying what the famous daytime TV idiot says. But it leads to absolute calamity and disaster, as we are seeing.

You can't control things by being nervous.

Everybody has their 15 minutes, and those 15 minutes should be spent in a private limo and a private plane. It's the ultimate.