Industrial-strength foolishness sets in-in males, at least-at about the age of 18. This is why the military prefers males in the 18-to-25-year-old range when there's combat to be done.

An educated person is one who has learned that information almost always turns out to be at best incomplete and very often false, misleading, fictitious, mendacious - just dead wrong.

The people who are always hankering loudest for some golden yesteryear usually drive new cars.

Usually, terrible things that are done with the excuse that progress requires them are not really progress at all, but just terrible things.

The only thing I was fit for was to be a writer, and this notion rested solely on my suspicion that I would never be fit for real work, and that writing didn't require any.

The worst thing about being a tourist is having other tourists recognize you as a tourist.

What the New Yorker calls home would seem like a couple of closets to most Americans, yet he manages not only to live there but also to grow trees and cockroaches right on the premises.

In an age when the fashion is to be in love with yourself, confessing to be in love with somebody else is an admission of unfaithfulness to one's beloved.

Americans like fat books and thin women.

A solved problem creates two new problems, and the best prescription for happy living is not to solve any more problems.

It seems to be a law in American life that whatever enriches us anywhere except in the wallet inevitably becomes uneconomic.

Listen within to find shining poetry and hear extraordinary music. You are a work of art.

We are now forming a republican government. Real liberty is never found in despotism or the extremes of democracy, but in moderate governments.

People get used to anything. The less you think about your oppression, the more your tolerance for it grows.

I get a lot of work done in my dreams and I don't want to take anybody else's work with me.

We are star stuff which has taken its destiny into its own hands. The loom of time and space works the most astonishing transformations of matter.

I was always younger than anyone around me. One day it began to change.

When people treat you like nothing, you begin to feel like nothing.

Mumford & Sons' music appeals to a lot of America. I'm really proud of them.

If a writer disbelieves what he is writing, then he can hardly expect his reader to believe it.

I was taught from a young age that many people would treat me as a second-class citizen because I was African-American and because I was female.