In many traditions, the world was sung into being: Aboriginal Australians believe their ancestors did so. In Hindu and Buddhist thought, Om was the seed syllable that created the world.

The silencing of the rainforests is a double deforestation, not only of trees but a deforestation of the mind's music, medicine and knowledge.

Language is wild - you can't fence it or tell it what to do - and it's the same with people. Even under the worst excesses of Stalinism or consumerism, the human spirit will still express itself.

Children say they are unhappy in every language they have. They say it in silence, and they say it in riots.

We are animal in our blood and in our skin. We were not born for pavements and escalators but for thunder and mud.

Human language is lit with animal life: we play cats-cradle or have hare-brained ideas; we speak of badgering, or outfoxing someone; to squirrel something away and to ferret it out.

Just because Galileo was a heretic doesn't make every heretic a Galileo.

Singing with others is an unmediated, shared experience as each person feels the same music reverberating in their individual bodies. Singing is part of our humanity; it is embodied empathy.

Clock measurement is not time itself. In fact, so opposed are they that one could argue the clock is not a synonym, but the opposite of time.

A wild creature is not subject to any will except its own

As a writer you have a duty to be a messenger.

She saw why teachers get very old and stay very young. For there is no closer probing of the mind--not even in psychoanalysis.

Maybe we aren't so very different after all. There's good and bad in both of us, and that's what binds us together, for better or worse.

I'm a big micro manager; I'm a stickler about organisation; everything needs a place, a purpose, and micro managing myself even when I'm in the studio.

I am not a fanatic about anything. I do what I can do when I've got the time.

Many critics are like woodpeckers, who, instead of enjoying the fruit and shadow of a tree, hop incessantly around the trunk, pecking holes in the bark to discover some little worm or other.

I think when you're in the public eye, you feel a pressure to stay younger looking.

Being a working mom, you want to make a difference in our schools, which is making a difference in our children and ultimately it's making a difference in our community.

The Founding Fathers would be sorry to see that America had become so divided and factionalized.

It's incredible to be young and live here and not have to clean up your dorm room.

To me, being in your prime means playing your best and feeling your best, too.