Human inertia makes the everyday environment, the furniture, as it were, appear to be a given.

The moguls are driven by their respective desires for profit - period.

Mills insisted that a sociologist's proper subject was the intersection of biography and history.

My business is the analytical framework.

Navigation is power of a limited sort - it enables us to manage the immensity of the media torrent.

A century of convulsive change leaves huge demographic gouge marks.

We may repeat the awful revolutionary history of the 20th century because of the vulnerability of social movements to demagoguery.

It's an old anarchist dream that people can take care of their own lives.

Americas are, for a variety of reasons, the most adept at producing the kind of entertainment that delivers easy satisfactions.

Like Americans, people outside America want fun, want an emotional compensation for the utilitarianism and calculation that mark the rest of their lives.

American movies and music deliver themes of freedom, innocence, and power that appeal to others - partly because America itself was put together out of a multiplicity of national traditions.

Save your skin from the corrosive acids from the mouths of toxic people. Someone who just helped you to speak evil about another person can later help another person to speak evil about you.

The idea of capitalism is not just success but also the failure that allows success to happen.

The aim of being a good designer is to have an influence. If you design furniture or lifestyle, you should influence the way people evolve globally. It's good to have an influence.

I had four years of auditions, and nothing happened, until Francis Ford Coppola took a shot on me ['Tetro' in 2009]. I hadn't done a film, and suddenly I was the lead.

I wasn't ever good enough to be on the baseball team and that sort of stuff.

When levitation fails, a ladder prevails.

I don't think we are ready to die, any of us, not without being escorted.

Only mediocrities rise to the top in a system that won't tolerate wave making.

I never imagined when I began writing in the early 1960s I'd become professional and my life would be transformed.

I don't consider devotion to the past a form of snobbery. Just one of the more disastrous forms of unrequited love.