Nearly everything in the scheme of things works to dull a first-rate talent. But the worst probably is cowardice.

Writing books is the closest men ever come to childbearing.

A modern democracy is a tyranny whose borders are undefined; one discovers how far one can go only by traveling in a straight line until one is stopped.

The function of socialism is to raise suffering to a higher level.

Khomeini has offered us the opportunity to regain our frail religion ... faith in the power of words.

There was that law of life, so cruel and so just, that one must grow or else pay more for remaining the same.

Any war that requires the suspension of reason as a necessity for support is a bad war.

America is a hurricane, and the only people who do not hear the sound are those fortunate if incredibly stupid and smug White Protestants who live in the center, in the serene eye of the big wind.

I was thinking that surgeons had to be the happiest people on earth. To cut people up and get paid for it-that's happiness, I told myself.

Love asks us that we be a little braver than is comfortable, a little more generous, a little more flexible. It means living on the edge more than we care to.

Reaching consensus in a group is often confused with finding the right answer.

The people who pray together build together a better world

The Jews were God's chosen people.

My advice: Take a second out of the day today and be thankful for your family.

...the very basics of photography [can] be potent and strange. So why not make pictures about the medium itself and see where they would take me?

Billy Almon has all of his in-laws and outlaws here this afternoon.

If I were not a king, I would be a university man; and if it were so that I must be a prisoner, if I might have my wish, I would desire to have no other prison than that library [the Bodleian].

The science of love is the philosophy of the heart

The Queen and Electric Light Orchestra harmonies are so distinct and fit in our songs so well sometimes, but we don't know how to do them properly.

Short of throwing away all television sets, I really don't know what we can do about writing.

These principles have been proclaimed by God, by the Church, by the Saints, by Christian reason and morals.