Our media and political system has turned into a mutual protection racket.

Hyperbole was to Lyndon Johnson what oxygen is to life.

Creativity is piercing the mundane to find the marvelous.

Freedom begins the moment you realize someone else has been writing your story and it's time you took the pen from his hand and started writing it yourself.

As a student I learned from wonderful teachers and ever since then I've thought everyone is a teacher.

Charity provides crumbs from the table; justice offers a place at the table.

America's corporate and political elites now form a regime of their own and they're privatizing democracy. All the benefits - the tax cuts, policies and rewards flow in one direction: up.

Secrecy is the freedom tyrants dream of.

In marriage, everyday you love,and everyday you forgive.It is an ongoing sacrament, love and forgiveness

I'll believe corporations are people when Texas executes one

Democracy doesn't begin at the top; it begins at the bottom, when flesh-and-blood human beings fight to rekindle what Arlo Guthrie calls 'The Patriot's Dream.

Nothing is as valuable to a man as courage.

Every meal should be prepared with love and eaten in peace, because its purpose is to strengthen us for the service of Love.

In some ways all of my fiction is like a conversation I'm having with the writers I read when I was first falling in love with books.

In football you have an adversary; in cinema that adversary is yourself.

Meditation changes your character.

If a man is in need of rescue, an airplane can come in and throw flowers on him, and that's just about all. But a direct lift aircraft could come in and save his life.

Diagnoses exist to help get people services they need - but there's no such thing as mental illness. We're all mentally ill.

In everything, without doubt, truth has the advantage over imitation.

I think about dying. I've come to realize we all die alone in one way or another.

This is the merit and distinction of art: to be more real than reality, to be not nature but nature's essence.