Russian talk of political evil is as natural as eating.

Cherish your human connections: your relationships with friends and family.

What I like about cities is that everything is king size, the beauty and the ugliness.

Twentieth-century Russian literature has produced nothing special except perhaps one novel and two stories by Andrei Platonov, who ended his days sweeping streets.

How delightful to find a friend in everyone.

There are worse crimes than burning books. One of them is not reading them.

For darkness restores what light cannot repair.

I sit in the dark. And it would be hard to figure out which is worse; the dark inside, or the darkness out.

Geography blended with time equals destiny.

Life—the way it really is—is a battle not between good and bad, but between bad and worse

Poetry is what is gained in translation.

Fourscore and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.

Crippled and crazy, we hobble toward the finish line, pen in hand.

You see, time is an ocean, not a garden hose. Space is a puff of smoke, a wisp of cloud.

Punk rock is very rebellious, of course, but it also means thinking for yourself.

Good or bad, the one thing I can say about my art is, if I can quote Sinatra, I did it my way.

Don't focus so much on your relationships. Have fun with them. Or if you don't have them, you don't want them, have fun with that.

Prayer is especially crucial when you come to a place in your study where you are stuck and confused.

Energetic action on debt would make a radical difference to the prospects of many of the poorest countries in the world, at no practical cost to creditor countries.

But I may be one who does not care Ever to have tree bloom or bear.

If my life were a song it would probably be titled 'Roller Coaster', up and down all the time.