being asked to decide between your passion for work and your passion for children was like being asked by your doctor whether you preferred him to remove your brain or your heart.

I always return to Paris, taking my selves along - past self, customary self, the self I never had.

poetry ... shows with a sudden intense clarity what is already there.

nobody alive or dead deserves to be called a poetess.

The poor South. Already guilty of slavery, it became guilty of cigarettes.

I don't feel like a survivor. I feel left behind.

If you have goals and procrastination, you have nothing. If you have goals and you take action, you will have anything you want.

Messianic Judaism is not Christianity.

Fear makes people do cruel things, things they'll be ashamed of later

It's easy for people to grow up in our society believing that certain lifestyles are risk free when they certainly are not.

The healthy can't understand the emptied, the broken.

Pictorial art is relating tones to create beauty - like chords of music - not the faithful copying of the model.

Superstition changes a man to a beast, fanaticism makes him a wild beast, and despotism a beast of burden.

So Fox News is the voice of America and Obama is Stalin? Oh my God! I guess that makes me Yakov Smirnoff.

I can play a Jewish guy, another Jewish guy, and then another Jewish guy, and then maybe a Cuban guy. Or at least a Middle Eastern guy. But for me, they're all Jews.

There is neither Past nor Future. There is only the Present.