Often the block [in writing] comes from the wall of words that keep out the simplicity of sense.

After all, spinning is its own reward. There wouldn't be carousels if it weren't so.

The scale and the brutality of our prisons are the moral scandal of American life.

We breathe in our first language, and swim in our second.

The special virtue of freedom is not that it makes you richer and more powerful but that it gives you more time to understand what it means to be alive.

The loneliness of the expatriate is of an odd and complicated kind, for it is inseparable from the feeling of being free, of having escaped.

Frauds master our minds; magicians, like poets and lovers, engage them in a permanent maze of possibilities.

What drives innovation is abundance and ease, not the pressure of scarcity.

Sometimes having a good time can be the outward evidence of a deep re-thinking.

Wit and puns aren't just décor in the mind; they're essential signs that the mind knows it's on, recognizes its own software, can spot the bugs in its own program.

Fanaticism comes in as many flavors as there are human beings.

Love is useless when the person you love don't love you back

What to do? Fight it or play along? Was God behind it?

Look where we worship.

My lifetime is my existence in a sacred moment.

I lay in my dressing room after being in make-up waiting to go on. They knew I was feeling pretty rotten and they tried to give me time to rest. But I couldn't sleep. I couldn't do anything.

Pleasures of the mind have this advantage,--they never cloy nor wear themselves out, but increase by employment.

These are not necessarily our agendas, but we feel a part of what a performer is, and what a performer has to say is more than just words and music.

The cow is the purest type of sub-human life.

No one is more important to the future of our state than our teachers.

But steel bars have never yet kept out a mob; it takes something a good deal stronger: human courage backed up by the consciousness of being right.