If you can imagine a man having a vasectomy without anesthetic to the sound of frantic sitar-playing, you will have some idea of what popular Turkish music is like.

I can't think of anything that excites a greater sense of childlike wonder than to be in a country where you are ignorant of almost everything.

There are only three things that can kill a farmer: lightning, rolling over in a tractor, and old age.

That's the trouble with losing your mind; by the time it's gone, it's too late to get it back.

Hunters will tell you that a moose is a wily and ferocious forest creature. Nonsense. A moose is a cow drawn by a three-year-old.

Geologists are never at a loss for paperweights.

Of all the things I am not very good at, living in the real world is perhaps the most outstanding.

Physics is really nothing more than a search for ultimate simplicity, but so far all we have is a kind of elegant messiness.

Protons give an atom its identity, electrons its personality.

Why is it, I wondered, that old people are always so self-centered and excitable? But I just smiled benignly and stood back, comforted by the thought that soon they would be dead.

Language is more fashion than science, and matters of usage, spelling and pronunciation tend to wander around like hemlines.

You can't win an argument with an argument.

Boys are stupid, throw rocks at them.

Somehow, we [ Tan Dun and director Chen Kaige] were all privileged at the time; we could be outside of China. But at the moment, we had no sense of what the future was going to be like.

At twenty a man is a peacock, at thirty a lion, at forty a camel, at fifty a serpent, at sixty a dog, at seventy an ape, at eighty a nothing at all.

I produce music as an apple tree produces apples.

I grew up very self-loathing. I was a phobic. I had anxiety. I had panic attacks.

Whoever wants to be a Christian should tear the eyes out of his reason.

It was so nice to go into this fake courtroom [on Ally McBeal]. I immediately went up into the judge's chair. Nice view. A preferable perspective.

I was so opposed to the war in Vietnam that I initially refused President Nixon's urgings for me to go there.

takes a devil to make a decent angel.