A guy I interviewed for Hard Times says, "What do I remember about the Great Depression? That I was hungry, that's all." Elemental things.

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.

Every cataclysm is welcomed by somebody

The haft of the arrow had been feathered with one of the eagle's own Lures. We often give our enemies the means of our own destruction.

My dad was a dentist but I wasn't a hygienist. I assisted my dad.

The physician is only nature's assistant.

If you stay in the running-if you have endurance-you are bound to win over those who haven't.

I consider myself 'local' in Sweden.

To play the piano is to consort with nature. Every mollusk, galaxy, vapor or viper as well the sweet incense of love's distraction, is within the hands and grasp of the pianist.

Fashion is in my blood. Growing up, I was always clacking around the house in my mother's shoes.

Where you live in the United States shouldn't determine how long and how healthy you live - but it does, far more than it should.