The loneliness of the expatriate is of an odd and complicated kind, for it is inseparable from the feeling of being free, of having escaped.

After all, spinning is its own reward. There wouldn't be carousels if it weren't so.

The scale and the brutality of our prisons are the moral scandal of American life.

We breathe in our first language, and swim in our second.

The special virtue of freedom is not that it makes you richer and more powerful but that it gives you more time to understand what it means to be alive.

Frauds master our minds; magicians, like poets and lovers, engage them in a permanent maze of possibilities.

What drives innovation is abundance and ease, not the pressure of scarcity.

Sometimes having a good time can be the outward evidence of a deep re-thinking.

Wit and puns aren't just décor in the mind; they're essential signs that the mind knows it's on, recognizes its own software, can spot the bugs in its own program.

Fanaticism comes in as many flavors as there are human beings.

Over all, there are now more people under “correctional supervision” in America-more than six million-than were in the Gulag Archipelago under Stalin at its height.

A goal will always tell you where you don't want to be.

A lot of compelling stories in the world aren't being told, and the fact that people don't know about them compounds the suffering.

All good books have one thing in common - they are truer than if they had really happened.

I think we ought to have a kindness year, or a kindness century.

I'm alright, nobody worry about me. Why you gotta gimme a fight? Can't you just let it be.

We cannot win this war on terror if people are undercutting us. And one way to undercut us is to empower Iran.

At certain moments of intense personal grief, capturing images was for me the only way to comprehend later what was happening.

If you don't like don't do it. But don't forget that: NO PAIN NO GAIN.

Farmers buy a lot of computers.

My inspiration is my hometown.