I still think the best classic meal in New York is a coffee-shop breakfast - you sort of can't skip it.

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.

Few great men could pass personnel.

In the deep dark silence, my mind dances with the moonlight and feels the joy of this precious ephemeral life.

I wanted it for how it made me feel, regardless of how little it cared for me. Do whatever you want -- just give me the bliss.

To be told we are loved is not enough. We must feel loved.

A good umpire is the umpire you don't even notice. He's there all afternoon but when the game is over, you don't even remember his name.

The casting couch? There's only one of us who ever made it to stardom without it, and that was Bette Davis.

Australia is a huge rest home, where no unwelcome news is ever wafted on to the pages of the worst newspapers in the world.

Dilettantism is the sort of thing one must avoid.

Did-a-chick? Dum-a-chum? Dad-a-cham? Ded-a-chek?

Tyrants never perish from tyranny, but always from folly,-when their fantasies have built up a palace for which the earth has no foundation.