Cooking is 80 percent confidence, a skill best acquired starting from when the apron strings wrap around you twice.

Hope is a renewable option: If you run out of it at the end of the day, you get to start over in the morning.

If you want sweet dreams, you've got to live a sweet life.

Few people know so clearly what they want. Most people can't even think what to hope for when they throw a penny in a fountain.

Finally, cooking is good citizenship. It's the only way to get serious about putting locally raised foods into your diet, which keeps farmlands healthy and grocery money in the neighborhood.

We came from Bethlehem, Georgia bearing Betty Crocker cake mixes into the jungle.

Maybe life doesn't get any better than this, or any worse, and what we get is just what we're willing to find: small wonders, where they grow.

Don't try to figure out what other people want to hear from you; figure out what you have to say.

The very least you can do in your life is to figure out what you hope for. And the most you can do is live inside that hope. Not admire it from a distance but live right in it, under its roof.

It's what you do that makes your soul.

Pain reaches the heart with electrical speed, but truth moves to the heart as slowly as a glacier.

The most beautiful work of art that we can create is this life.

He stared up at the moon, which looked like a giant hole in the sky, letting light through to the other side.

I'm not the type who'll yell about my achievements from the rooftops.

...as an actor there's nothing better than a great moody moment to play with nothing to say. It's so much easier to do because you can really get inside your head.

It has been my unbroken policy not to see newspaper writers or give interviews to anyone. At the word interview spoken or written my ears go up and my chin out.

I love to read. My education is self-inflicted

In Europe, anti-Americanism is much more a hobgoblin of the political, cultural, and religious elites.

God is a philosophical black hole-the point where reason breaks down.

Despite my professional experience, the fifteen-hour workdays, and a successful new show that I had helped build, MSNBC was still refusing to pay me what I was worth.

I grew up in Ohio, and I was a musicologist since I was little; it is all that I would ever read.