I thought, if ever there were a time to write a book about hope, it's now.

How come you don't work fourteen hours a day? Your great-great-grandparents did. How come you only work the eight-hour day? Four guys got hanged fighting for the eight-hour day for you.

People are hungry for stories. It's part of our very being. Storytelling is a form of history, of immortality too. It goes from one generation to another. -Studs Terkel

Most of us have jobs that are too small for our spirits.

Perhaps it is this specter that most haunts working men and women: the planned obsolescence of people that is of a piece with the planned obsolescence of the things they make. Or sell.

I want people to talk to one another no matter what their difference of opinion might be.

We are living in the United States of Alzheimer's. A whole country has lost its memory. When it can't remember yesterday, a country forgets what it once wanted to be.

Hope never trickles down. It always springs up.

Ordinary people are capable of doing extraordinary things, and that's what it's all about. They must count.

I've always felt, in all my books, that there's a deep decency in the American people and a native intelligence - providing they have the facts, providing they have the information.

More and more we are into communications; and less and less into communication.

There is no greater fulfillment as the pursuit of dreams.

I have always believed that I should have had no difficulty in causing my rights to be respected.

The problem is you tend to look back and identify mistakes, and as a consequence of feeling terrible about mistakes you say you bungled this so bad, let's get out of here.

A difference is a difference only if it makes a difference.

My timing’s a little off. But I’m about to get hotter than Jamaica in the middle of August.

Cats, for the most part, seem indifferent to human activities that do not revolve around their needs and wants. They all but roll their eyes at the owners who expect their cats to do things for them.

Travel. You need to know you're a citizen of the world.

Jesus is absolutely at the centre of Western civilisation and part of my fascination with him is, why? What is it about this particular man and his story?

I think I write in order to discover on my shelf a new book that I would enjoy reading, or to see a new play that would engross me.