Pain pays no attention to moans or excuses.

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.

Happiness doesn't come from doing what we like to do but from liking what we have to do.

Sometimes, the only way to exorcise old ghosts is to pack your bags and move in with them.

Surveillance cameras might reduce crime - even though the evidence here is mixed - but no studies show that they result in greater happiness of everyone involved.

My tastes in what I eat at home would be very familiar to most people who cook for families. I just organize those things a little bit differently.

Our lives are determined less by our childhood than by the traumatic way we have learned to remember our childhoods.

Democrats - always standing up for what they later realize they should have believed in.

Sometimes I forget that the world is not on the same schedule as I. That everything is not dying, or that if it is dying it will return to life, what with a little sun and the usual encouragement.

The cinema is an explosion of my love for reality.

When once ambition has passed its natural limits, its progress is boundless.

The Labour party has never been a socialist party, although there have always been socialists in it - a bit like Christians in the Church of England.