Something was still there, that something that distinguishes an artist from a performer: the revealing of self. Here I be. Not forlong, but here I be. In sensing her mortality, we sensed our own.

How come you don't work fourteen hours a day? Your great-great-grandparents did. How come you only work the eight-hour day? Four guys got hanged fighting for the eight-hour day for you.

People are hungry for stories. It's part of our very being. Storytelling is a form of history, of immortality too. It goes from one generation to another. -Studs Terkel

Most of us have jobs that are too small for our spirits.

Perhaps it is this specter that most haunts working men and women: the planned obsolescence of people that is of a piece with the planned obsolescence of the things they make. Or sell.

I want people to talk to one another no matter what their difference of opinion might be.

We are living in the United States of Alzheimer's. A whole country has lost its memory. When it can't remember yesterday, a country forgets what it once wanted to be.

Hope never trickles down. It always springs up.

Ordinary people are capable of doing extraordinary things, and that's what it's all about. They must count.

I've always felt, in all my books, that there's a deep decency in the American people and a native intelligence - providing they have the facts, providing they have the information.

More and more we are into communications; and less and less into communication.

I'm sure the other kids wouldn't mind not being lectured by another toddler over the virtues of sharing and the mental benefits of toy blocks.

George Lucas should have distributed the 'source code' to Star Wars. Millions of fans would create their own movies and stories. Most of them would be terrible, but a few would be genius.

A pretty face can capture my attention but only a beautiful mind can hold it.

Creeds made in Dark Ages are like drawings made in dark rooms

My mom was born poor, raised poor, and was going to die poor.

I'm half-Japanese, so I collect toys, like a Yayoi Kusama stuffed pumpkin.

There will be no support in the island of Ireland for building a nuclear power station.

If you got to have a dream, you may as well dream big.

There are stars, stars, scattered stars, blackness all between. They ripple and fold and bend, and they rush toward him, rush by him. Their colors are blazing and pure as angels' eyes.

Talking to celebrities is too much effort. They all think the same.