Precisely at the point when you begin to develop a conscience you must find yourself at war with your society.

It took many years of vomiting up all the filth I’d been taught about myself, and half-believed, before I was able to walk on the earth as though I had a right to be here.

I imagine one of the reasons people cling to their hates so stubbornly is because they sense, once hate is gone, they will be forced to deal with pain.

Children have never been very good at listening to their elders, but they have never failed to imitate them.

There are so many ways of being despicable it quite makes one’s head spin. But the way to be really despicable is to be contemptuous of other people’s pain.

The most dangerous creation of any society is the man who has nothing to lose.

It demands great spiritual resilience not to hate the hater whose foot is on your neck, and an even greater miracle of perception and charity not to teach your child to hate.

Freedom is not something that anybody can be given. Freedom is something people take, and people are as free as they want to be

People can cry much easier than they can change.

Perhaps home is not a place but simply an irrevocable condition.

Know from whence you came. If you know whence you came, there are absolutely no limitations to where you can go.

Human life is driven forward by its dim apprehension of notions too general for its existing language.

One of the things that's complicated about writing anything is that it's an act of narcissism, and then of course once it sails out into the world, you have to let go of it.

I didn't know I was going to live for 50 years. It has come as a shock.

The readings of Soviet society are as many as the experts you speak to. In my view, it's a society that is overdue for measures of democratization and organization.

Pictures can be pretty deceptive.

I think that power comes in numbers, and we're in an industry where the actors need to have a bigger voice.

The depth of a friendship - how much it means to us ... depends, at least in part, upon how many parts of ourselves a friend sees, shares and validates.

You'd have to be completely crazy not to be influenced by and take from other artists. It's completely impossible not to.

I'm not really in a hurry to ever wear a neck brace. That's why I'm kind of positive about it, because I'm healthy.

Death is a zero sum game for which there is no cure.