A high church for the true mediocre.

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.

Stay wild.

The world around me was oblivious, but for once, I felt absolute

People never grow up, they just learn how to act in public.

Sanity is a sonnet with a strict meter and rhyme scheme-and my mind is free verse.

Our teachers at the public school level are the most underpaid for the importance of their job in America.

I've been around the world and I've had bras made in different places, and each time I'm experiencing the same troubles: the painful shoulders, the underwire cutting into my flesh.

I always thought of my career as a body of work and not just about numbers.

There are no rules in life. It’s a mind-set that limits people dramatically.

Sometimes, you still have days when you don't just feel right, like there is a kind of congestion, and the flow isn't there. You're just not playing clearly.

We are reassured almost as foolishly as we are alarmed; human nature is so constituted.