All tastes have the quality of being in some way artificial and invented. The secret of life is to have enough detachment from your tastes and your values to see that they are a little bit absurd.

After all, spinning is its own reward. There wouldn't be carousels if it weren't so.

The scale and the brutality of our prisons are the moral scandal of American life.

We breathe in our first language, and swim in our second.

The special virtue of freedom is not that it makes you richer and more powerful but that it gives you more time to understand what it means to be alive.

The loneliness of the expatriate is of an odd and complicated kind, for it is inseparable from the feeling of being free, of having escaped.

Frauds master our minds; magicians, like poets and lovers, engage them in a permanent maze of possibilities.

What drives innovation is abundance and ease, not the pressure of scarcity.

Sometimes having a good time can be the outward evidence of a deep re-thinking.

Wit and puns aren't just décor in the mind; they're essential signs that the mind knows it's on, recognizes its own software, can spot the bugs in its own program.

Fanaticism comes in as many flavors as there are human beings.

A retreat from someone or something isn't unusual. Just as how you edge closer to see better, at times you may need to take a step back to get a clearer view.

If we don’t know who we are, we conceal our true selves and bear their brand

That I would be loved even when I numb myself. That I would be good even when I am overwhelmed. That I would be loved even when I was fuming. That I would be good even if I was clingy.

Music to me is life. It's what gets me going.

I wondered what that was like, to hold someone’s hand. I bet you could sometimes find all of the mysteries of the universe in someone’s hand.

Love is a way of living, and not something that you give.

I'm a big believer that dreams don't have deadlines!

It is important to note that the world changes and that perception of music changes as well.

I am a great artist and I know it, it is because I am that I have been able to endure so much suffering.

A strong economy depends on a strong middle class, but George Bush has put the middle class in a hole, and John McCain has a plan to keep digging that hole with George Bush's shovel.