Lots of times you can feel as an exile in a country that you were born in.

Every great work of art ... is a celebration, an act of insubordination against the betrayals, horrors and infidelities of life.

I see people who talk about America, and then undermine it by not paying attention to its soul, to its poetry. I see polarization, reductionism and superficiality.

Once we know of atrocities we cannot remain silent, and knowledge inevitably leads to an urge to protect the innocent.

That, of course, is what great works of imagination do for us: They make us a little restless, destabilize us, question our preconceived notions and formulas.

I no longer believe that we can keep silent. We never really do, mind you. In one way or another we articulate what has happened to us through the kind of people we become.

You need imagination in order to imagine a future that doesn't exist.

It is amazing how, when all possibilities seem to be taken away from you, the minutest opening can become a great freedom.

The negative side of the American Dream comes when people pursue success at any cost, which in turn destroys the vision and the dream.

I eat my heart out alone.

I am suddenly left alone again on the sunny path, with a memory of the rain.

My mother is an actress, and she used to drag me from theater to theater and reading to reading.

My prodigious sin was, and still is, being a non-conformist. Although I am not a Communist I refused to fall in line by hating them.

A couple of months in the laboratory can frequently save a couple of hours in the library.

There's never been a greater game than football.

There are many cases around the world in which the presence of UN peace-keeping forces has had a somewhat beneficial effect.

Keep a grateful journal. Every night, list five things that you are grateful for. What it will begin to do is change our perspective of your day and your life.

People suffer all their life long, under the foolish superstition that they can be cheated. But it is impossible for a person to be cheated by anyone but himself.

In the school I went to, they asked a kid to prove the law of gravity and he threw the teacher out of the window.

A lot of people in television who've had successful shows claim the 'Roseanne' show as their starting place, and I'm really proud of that.

I am so scared of the sea, so what did I do? Learned to scuba in the Great Barrier Reef.