The issue is privacy. Why is the decision by a woman to sleep with a man she has just met in a bar a private one, and the decision to sleep with the same man for $100 subject to criminal penalties?

The thing that is really hard, and really amazing, is giving up on being perfect and beginning the work of becoming yourself.

I would be the most content if my children grew up to be the kind of people who think decorating consists mostly of building enough bookshelves.

A finished person is a boring person.

There is a little boy inside the man who is my brother... Oh, how I hated that little boy. And how I love him too.

After all those years as a woman hearing 'not thin enough, not pretty enough, not smart enough, not this enough, not that enough,' almost overnight I woke up one morning and thought, 'I'm enough.'

Books are the plane, and the train, and the road. They are the destination, and the journey. They are home.

There is a lot of talk now about metal detectors and gun control. Both are good things. But they are no more a solution than forks and spoons are a solution to world hunger.

Look back, to slavery, to suffrage, to integration and one thing is clear. Fashions in bigotry come and go. The right thing lasts.

You are the only person alive who has sole custody of your life ... Your entire life ... Not just the life of your mind, but the life of your heart. Not just your bank account, but your soul.

America is a country that seems forever to be toddler or teenager, at those two stages of human development characterized by conflict between autonomy and security.

A dead Christ I must do everything for

I'm sure I'll know it by the time I'm 80.

But you mark my words: I will be there when everything you love is destroyed. Everything you didn't even believe you would have.

...it is easy not to believe in monsters, considerably more difficult to escape their dread and loathsome clutches.

We have become so engrossed in the work of the Lord that we have forgotten the Lord of the work.

With the possible exception of the equator, everything begins somewhere.

Is this the destiny of man? Is he only happy before he has acquired his reason or after he has lost it?

We were shooting this movie called "Hardball," with Keanu Reeves. We shot in the city, and I just remember I couldn't really do too much. At 13 or 14, you couldn't go out to any nightlife.

It was a challenge for me to see how I could deal with that at Jil, and I had a lot of doubt about it. I wondered if maybe it was just better to do your own thing in the long run, like an artist.

But when a girl gives a boy a dead squid - that had to mean something.