Nonetheless, do I have respect for people who believe in the hereafter? Of course I do. I might add, perhaps even a touch of envy too, because of the solace.

How come you don't work fourteen hours a day? Your great-great-grandparents did. How come you only work the eight-hour day? Four guys got hanged fighting for the eight-hour day for you.

People are hungry for stories. It's part of our very being. Storytelling is a form of history, of immortality too. It goes from one generation to another. -Studs Terkel

Most of us have jobs that are too small for our spirits.

Perhaps it is this specter that most haunts working men and women: the planned obsolescence of people that is of a piece with the planned obsolescence of the things they make. Or sell.

I want people to talk to one another no matter what their difference of opinion might be.

We are living in the United States of Alzheimer's. A whole country has lost its memory. When it can't remember yesterday, a country forgets what it once wanted to be.

Hope never trickles down. It always springs up.

Ordinary people are capable of doing extraordinary things, and that's what it's all about. They must count.

I've always felt, in all my books, that there's a deep decency in the American people and a native intelligence - providing they have the facts, providing they have the information.

More and more we are into communications; and less and less into communication.

I'll see a celadon green room in an 18th century New Hampshire house and just fall in love. Colors stay in my head.

I'm so grateful that God allowed me to go through that because it's made me.

Beauty isn't about looking perfect. It's about celebrating your individuality.

A dagger is the noble weapon of Brutus. Everyone understands that tyrants fall to daggers. A bomb is a sordid modern device with many complex working parts. Only engineers understand bombs

My idea of a good place to shop is Costco - it has these heavily marbled fillet steaks. The idea of eating some wheat thing and washing it down with carrot juice has never appealed to me.

The fight against hunger and poverty is also predicated on the creation of a world order that accords priority to social and economic development.

I started to play Jazz music in my early teens. A boyfriend brought records over, so I listened to everything

Interesting things happen when the creative impulse is cultivated with curiosity, freedom and intensity.

I was still thought of as a kid actor even though I was in my mid twenties.

Miss Dietrich is not so much a performer as a one-woman environment.