Ruth Bader Ginsburg is the most liberal and illumined of the nine Justices of the U.S. Supreme Court.

I just go to lunch. And I never know when something is going into the file and something is not.

I have always had a particular antagonism for the military.

I never know what's going to happen in a novel. I don't have a plan or an outline.

And off in the far distance, the gold on the wings of the angel atop the bell tower of San Marco flashed in the sun, bathing the entire city in its glistening benediction.

Venetians feel affection and loyalty to their city, rather than to the Italian state.

This is a fallen world. People lie, the truth gets distorted, and that's the way it is. What's for dinner ?

All through graduate school, instead of having a television I read murder mysteries: Hammett, Chandler, Ruth Rendell, P. D. James.

Oh, so seldom does fate cast our enemy into our hands, to do with as we will

And I don't want to live anywhere where I am famous. It makes me very, very uncomfortable, because it conveys an advantage over people, and I don't like that.

I never wanted to be rich or successful or famous. I just wanted to be happy and have fun.

When I'm with you, bells go off in my head like a moving truck that's backing up.

The question, therefore, is not whether one should teach philosophy to Muslim students, but rather what kind or kinds of philosophy should be taught and how the subject should be approached.

With wisdom comes responsibility. Somewhere along the way, I misplaced both.

It is just human nature to take time to connect the dots, I know that. But I also know that there can be a day of reckoning when you wish you had connected the dots more quickly.

My brother and I, we were both relatively good-looking guys growing up, but we had our awkward stages, where we were just hard to look at.

I knew I was blessed with a gift of having both parents.

Vampire? Such a provocative word, wrapped in too many clichés and girly novels.

The good news is we have the technology and the tools to alleviate poverty on a global scale. All that is standing in our way is education and will.

nothing is so pleasant ... as to display your worldly wisdom in epigram and dissertation, but it is a trifle tedious to hear another person display theirs.

The American political system is a giant bureaucracy.