I don't think San Francisco needs defending. I never meet anyone who doesn't love the place, Americans or others.

We use our parents like recurring dreams, to be entered into when needed.

A simple grateful thought turned heavenwards is the most perfect prayer.

Whatever you're meant to do, do it now. The conditions are always impossible.

If a fish is the movement of water embodied, given shape, then cat is a diagram and pattern of subtle air.

Every child has the capacity to be everything.

Any human anywhere will blossom in a hundred unexpected talents and capacities simply by being given the opportunity to do so.

What's terrible is to pretend that second-rate is first-rate. To pretend that you don't need love when you do; or you like your work when you know quite well you're capable of better.

Things are not quite so simple always as black and white.

You have to be grown up, really grown up, not merely in years, to understand your parents.

There is nothing more boring for an intelligent woman than to spend endless amounts of time with small children.

Creativity is a synthesis of two qualities: imagination and concreteness.

Unfortunately, a lot of the concepts in the Bible are based on ancient mythology that doesn't fit the findings of science.

I worry that as the problem-solving power of our technologies increases, our ability to distinguish between important and trivial or even non-existent problems diminishes.

I got Oedipus off the incest charge--technicality, of course--he didn't know it was his mother at the time.

Attempt something so impossible that unless God is in it, it's doomed to failure.

Universal, equal, direct and secret elections in the U.S.S.R. will be a whip in the hands of the population against poorly functioning organs of government.

Acting is about enhancing your life, not representing something that's missing.

Biologically, physiologically, we are not so different from each other; historically, as narratives - we are each of us unique.

Who has smelled the woodsmoke at twilight, who has seen the campfire burning, who is quick to read the noises of the night?

I tried. Can't do it. Brain's empty.