Looking backward at what has been lost, I feel sad, then indifferent, and at last relieved.

Pain narrows consciousness; pleasure blurs it.

When Medusa looks in the mirror, she sees the Lady of Sorrows.

My passions have never jumped out of the fireplace and set fire to the carpet.

Retirement requires the invention of a new hedonism, not a return to the hedonism of youth

The sewing machine joins what the scissors have cut asunder, plus whatever else comes in its path.

Clothes make a statement. Costumes tell a story.

The laughter of the aphorism is sometimes triumphant, but seldom carefree.

'Be faithful to your roots' is the liberal version of 'Stay in your ghetto.'

Every day begins with an act of courage and hope: getting out of bed.

Totem poles and wooden masks no longer suggest tribal villages but fashionable drawing rooms in New York and Paris.

Wait until you meet my family. At Thanksgiving, we kill everything we can find, put it into a pot, and call it 'holiday gumbo'.

The artist is the only one who knows that the world is a subjective creation, that there is a choice to be made, a selection of elements.

It's true, we tend to write about the same thing over and over again because this is our trauma. If I had been in World War II, I might have been writing about D-Day over and over again.

I'm very lucky that my husband is a true partner in child-rearing. If I get home late, he gets home early or vice-versa. I travel more, and he's able to spell me when I'm gone.

I think that young people understand me perfectly. I think that's the luckiest thing about my career, that I get older and they get younger, and it didn't stop with my generation.

The proper artistic response to digital technology is to embrace it as a new window on everything thats eternally human, and to use it with passion, wisdom, fearlessness and joy

The essential thing to know about God is that God is Good. All the rest is secondary.

Upon being asked by a fan how to become a writer, Stephen King replied, "Write.

I still insist that American performers are the best performers in the world.

When we started making electronic music I imagined that the reaction we got from the rock musicians must have been similar to the one the beat groups got from people like my dad.