I want a language that speaks the truth.

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.

the body is wiser than its inhabitants. the body is the soul. the body is god’s messenger.

If you are flattering a woman, it pays to be a little more subtle. You don't have to bother with men, they believe any compliment automatically.

There are lots of authentic, moving characters in so-called systems novels, just as there are certainly deep structural ideas in some character-driven novels.

I really think about the times that I've been through with my husband and all the stuff that we've been through together, and I think to those moments for inspiration for the role.

Yeah I'm thirty-six, but on the show I'm thirty-two. Nobody wants to watch a thirty-six year old woman, so they decided to make me thirty-two. Much more appealing somehow.

I want to go to bed richer than when I woke up. The pursuit of wealth is a wonderful thing, but the thing is you have to be honest about it, you have to tell the truth.

I own some bugs encased in lucite or something. I also have a big cat's eye - a fake one - made for a taxidermist. I really like animals.

A man's wife has more power over him than the state has.

Love and Loyalty, run deeper than blood." Love that quote even though I haven't read the book.

I'm a native New Yorker. Everything to do with New York feels like my family.