It's very hard to know who your readers are, but that's who I'm... if I have somebody in my head, that's probably who it is.

Quotable quotes are coins rubbed smooth by circulation.

We have much wisdom to gain by learning to understand other people's cultures and permitting ourselves to accept that there is more than one version of reality.

If time is a staircase, reality is a Slinky. Decades can be parsed. Television, frequently accused of destabilizing life, is actually what stitches the segments together.

Writers are not mere copyists of language; they are polishers, embellishers, perfecters. They spend hours getting the timing right so that what they write sounds completely unrehearsed.

I don't think the same curriculum fits every student body.

One of the oddities about responses that you get to what you write, if you get a fair number of them, is that people have very different ideas of what you said.

One of the good things about the profession of being a professor, is that you also have time to do what interests you and what you care about or what you're good at.

I don't really usually push an agenda, and I don't feel that my main job is to persuade people of something. My main job is to help them think about something.

There are limits, after all, to the idea of limits.

Obviously input is helpful to faculty in trying to come up with a curriculum, but ultimately it's the faculty's job to know what students need to know. Make a decision about it and present it.

I never said she was a lady.

All human wisdom is summed up in two words-wait and hope.

It is good to appreciate that life is now. Whatever it offers, little or much, life is now – this day – this hour.

There are some things that can be learned by the head, but Christ crucified can only be learned by the heart

Hitchcock used to believe that if there were three or four memorable scenes in a film that would be enough to drive it, but I don't know if that's true or not.

You beat the liver out of a goose to get a pâté; you pound the muscles of a man's cardia to get a philosopher.

I'm a serious geek. I mean I seriously want to own a unicorn when I'm older . . . or a Pegasus . . . yeah Pegasus sounds better.

The fear of God kills all other fears.

It's depressing when you're still around and your albums are out of print.

The doorway to success swings outward not inward.