I think our sensibility is not modernist anymore, that is, sensibility of people who are interested in art and literature.

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.

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.

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.

Today, I would pick the person who made me feel warm, rather than the one who left me cold.

No one has any right to tell you that the way you perceive yourself is wrong. Because by doing so, they also discourage the person you aspire to be.

This was the mark of an uncommon soldier, someone whose courage away from the battlefield was the same as that on it.

Juggling being a mom and an entertainer is a challenge I face every day.

I don't want to impede free press, by the way. The last thing I would want to do is that.

Alas, why will a man spend months trying to hand over his liberty to a woman--and the rest of his life trying to get it back again?

Everybody likes to go their own way–to choose their own time and manner of devotion.

There is no folly of which a man who is not a fool cannot get rid except vanity; of this nothing cures a man except experience of its bad consequences, if indeed anything can cure it.

I used to have only one name; it used to mean something.

If you don't look at yourself and evaluate it, you instead see how the world's reacting to it.