Saddest of all are the woman who were brought up to believe that self-sacrifice is the highest female virtue.

Darkness as well as light. Or do I mean darkness, another kind of light? Lucifer would say so, and I have a weakness for fallen angels.

I know from my own experience that suicide is not what it seems. Too easy to try to piece together the fragmented life. The spirit torn in bits so that the body follows.

I dream of flight, not to be as the angels are, but to rise above the smallness of it all. The smallnesss that I am. Against the daily death the iconography of wings.

Examine this statement: ‘A woman cannot be a poet.’ Dr Samuel Johnson (Englishman 1709-84 Occupation: Language Fixer and Big Mouth.) What then shall I give up? My poetry or my womanhood?

But if what can exist does exist, is memory invention or is invention memory?

Look up. This is the season of shooting stars. Light, two thousand years old, still dazzling. Let me see your face. Your face lit up by twenty centuries.

I think therefore I am. Does that mean 'I feel therefore I'm not'? But only through feeling can I get at thinking.

Time: Change experienced and observed. Time measured by the angle of the turning earth as it rotates through its axis. The earth turning slowly on its spit under the fire of the sun.

The words come at my call but who calls whom?

Fall for me, as an apple falls, as rain falls, because you must. Use gravity to anchor your desire.

Somebody gets into trouble, then gets out of it again. People love that story. They never get tired of it.

... Once a penguin finds its perfect other penguin, they stay together pretty much forever.

Those who meet objections to their forcing their religion on others with cries of 'Show respect!' clearly have no grasp of irony.

Let us not seek to bring religion to others, but let us endeavor to live it ourselves.

When you think about it, media's the intersection of content and technology - it's all about storytelling, like photography and the camera.

It's interesting, winning an Academy Award as a young man... life-changing, but I'm just me within that. It's been very helpful for my career, but I'm trying to stay on the path I was on before.

By your hand, millions - billions - of lives will be altered, caught up in a chain of events begun by you this day.

The more moral you pretend to be, the less moral you are; the less moral you try to be, the more moral you are.

I've always thought of science fiction as being, at some level, a 19th-century business.

Men thin away to insignificance and oblivion quite as often by not making the most of good spirits when they have them as by lacking good spirits when they are indispensable.