Good editorial writing has less to do with winning an argument, since the other side is mostly not listening, than with telling the guys on your side how they ought to sound when they’re arguing.

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.

It unsettles the women as they have dropped their disguise and are now giant praying mantis with blonde and auburn wigs, lipstick smeared on those deadly pincher-like insect jaws.

Extreme joy and extreme sorrow are indistinguishable beyond a certain point. ("Jane Brown's Body")

Hip-Hop isn't just music, it is also a spiritual movement of the blacks! You can't just call Hip-Hop a trend!

I think the only safe medium are books, because people like to hold books in their hand.

Zen is a very quick path. Zen is the path of meditation. The word Zen means emptiness or fullness, meditation. Meditation is the quickest path to enlightenment.

I thought that's what happened to women: You live alone when you're old.

Higher energy prices act like a tax.

...in the face of all dangers, in what may seem a godless region, we move forward through the agencies of love and art.

America has shown its evil intentions, and the proud Iraqi people cannot accept it. They must defend their rights by any means they see fit.

an autobiography held out the promise of hearing truths that only friends confess to one another but are knowledge you need to live.