Memory is imagination pinned down.

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.

Once you drop a mask, you can never wear it again.

Whatever you can conceive, you can achieve it.

To the very last, the desire to challenge oneself and understand more. And to the very last: doubt.

Any man who is attached to things of this world is one who lives in ignorance and is being consumed by the snakes of his own passions

The future cannot be predicted, but futures can be invented.

I know I'm famous and irresitible - a combination whose properties closely resemble radioactivity - and I know that you in this room are helpless against me.

Iron rusts from disuse; water loses its purity from stagnation... even so does inaction sap the vigor of the mind.

If there are lessons to be drawn from the sciences, then that should be the concern of everyone, including scientists to the extent that they can make a contribution.

Work without vision is drudgery. Vision without work is dreaming. Work coupled with vision is destiny.

Someone once described me as a maverick and that's what I would say. I'm a maverick not by choice but by conviction.