I don't really usually push an agenda, and I don't feel that my main job is to persuade people of something. My main job is to help them think about something.

Quotable quotes are coins rubbed smooth by circulation.

We have much wisdom to gain by learning to understand other people's cultures and permitting ourselves to accept that there is more than one version of reality.

If time is a staircase, reality is a Slinky. Decades can be parsed. Television, frequently accused of destabilizing life, is actually what stitches the segments together.

Writers are not mere copyists of language; they are polishers, embellishers, perfecters. They spend hours getting the timing right so that what they write sounds completely unrehearsed.

I don't think the same curriculum fits every student body.

One of the oddities about responses that you get to what you write, if you get a fair number of them, is that people have very different ideas of what you said.

One of the good things about the profession of being a professor, is that you also have time to do what interests you and what you care about or what you're good at.

There are limits, after all, to the idea of limits.

Obviously input is helpful to faculty in trying to come up with a curriculum, but ultimately it's the faculty's job to know what students need to know. Make a decision about it and present it.

Literature is being taught as though it were only political medicine or political poison-a view that is not only illiberal but illiterate.

Even as a little kid, I was fascinated by newspapers and magazines. They were my TV. I'd be the first one up to grab the morning paper, mainly to look at the sports pictures, the war pictures.

Having your health is having everything in life.

Kiss me, Hardy!’ Weren’t those Nelson’s last words at the Battle of Trafalgar? Don’t cry. We’re still alive and we make a sensational team.

Games give you a chance to excel.

I'm always going to be looking for something artistically or whatever. I think that's part of being driven, but that doesn't necessarily mean I'm unhappy.

But one day we shall be rich, and the next poor. One day we shall dine in a palace and the next we'll sit in a forest and toast mushrooms on a hatpin.

A victory? What have we won? We've won a rock in the middle of a wasteland, on the shores of a poisoned sea.

Become more and more innocent, less knowledgeable and more childlike. Take life as fun - because that's precisely what it is!

Any society that doesn't take care of its weaker younger members is not one to be proud of.

It is not freedom from conditions, but it is freedom to take a stand toward the conditions.