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.

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

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.

Work harder on improving yourself than on trying to forge better relationships.

Year: A period of three hundred and sixty-five disappointments.

Hoboken is a neat place.

Dating is about finding out who you are and who others are. If you show up in a masquerade outfit, neither is going to happen.

Lincoln was the greatest speaker and he was ridiculed for how he looked, you know?

Because handsomeness is always accompanied by vanity.And I suppose ugliness is accompanied by a wealth of virtues?

What you do should speak so loudly that no one will hear what you say.

You must first be willing to fail — and you must have the courage to go for it anyway.

Also, chubby people can never truly pull off ethereal the same way skinny people can never be jolly.

You reach your audience at the moment when you really have something to say - that is, when you're not just delivering a performance.