Amherst was pivotal in my broad intellectual development; MIT in my development as a professional economist.

International lending banks need to focus on areas where private investment doesn't go, such as infrastructure projects, education and poverty relief.

Macroeconomic policy can never be devoid of politics: it involves fundamental trade-offs and affects different groups differently.

It is trust, more than money, that makes the world go round.

There must have been something in the air of Gary that led one into economics: the first Nobel Prize winner, Paul Samuelson, was also from Gary, as were several other distinguished economists.

What you measure affects what you do. If you don't measure the right thing, you don't do the right thing.

American inequality didn't just happen. It was created.

The problem is a lot of what is called economics is not economics. It is more ideology or religion.

Trickle-down economics is a myth. Enriching corporations - as the TPP would - will not necessarily help those in the middle, let alone those at the bottom.

The striking thing about America is - it's historically, extraordinary unusual, I don't of any other instance - is that productivity of workers and wages have not moved in tandem.

In developing countries, lack of infrastructure is a far more serious barrier to trade than tariffs.

Nope. That´s my line. This is my boyfriend´s house, which makes that my line,exclusively.Where is he?" Nora (p. 287)

All artists have runners, people that tell them what to do, business managers, lawyers, these - if they get the right ones, they're lucky, and if they get the wrong ones, they're unlucky.

I think there's no purpose for writing music if it is not meaningful.

You can't rest on any laurels if they exist, and happily there are some from the franchise, but you have to always expand your own horizon both creatively and technically as well.

We have woven a web, you and I, attached to this world but a separate world of our own invention.

My favorite film is always the one that I most recently worked on.

The UN is hardly democratic.

Friends, the soil is poor, we must sow seeds in plenty for us to garner even modest harvests.

Whatever we understand and enjoy in human products instantly becomes ours, wherever they might have their origin... Let me feel with unalloyed gladness that all the great glories of man are mine.

I was informed yesterday that there's a Twitter account for my laugh. Very hard to get used to things like that. Pretty amazing.