There's lots of things you don't know. All kinds of strange things . . . mostly they happened before we were born: that makes them seem to me so much more real.

She is pure Alice in Wonderland, and her appearance and demeanor are a nicely judged mix of the Red Queen and a Flamingo.

Failure is the condiment that gives success its flavor.

A conversation is a dialogue, not a monologue. That's why there are so few good conversations: due to scarcity, two intelligent talkers seldom meet.

I believe more in the scissors than I do in the pencil.

The wind is us-- it gathers and remembers all our voices, then sends them talking and telling through the leaves and the fields.

Anyone who ever gave you confidence, you owe them a lot.

I love New York, even though it isn't mine, the way something has to be, a tree or a street or a house, something, anyway, that belongs to me because I belong to it.

When you've got nowhere to turn, turn on the gas.

Well, I'm about as tall as a shotgun, and just as noisy.

A man who doesn't dream is like a man who doesn't sweat. He stores up a lot of poison.

I come from a culture of handwringers, vengeance seekers, people who name children after ancestors by rote -- first child, paternal grandfather, second child, maternal, and on and on and on.

Down close to certain flowersall excesses are sufficiencies

No matter what the odds, a man does not pin his last hope for survival on something and then expect that it will fail.

If great lecture is theatre, the future of learning is games.

Of the quaking recruit, three pitched battles make a grim grenadier; and he who shrank from the muzzle of a cannon, is now ready to yield his mustache for a sponge.

The only reason for mastering technique is to make sure the body does not prevent the soul from expressing itself.

I don't need arms, and neither does anyone else... At the very least, a ban would prevent fights from turning deadly.

I'd been fired by CBS News in a semipublic way, and as the months went by, there was a perception that I was damaged goods.

All the blues greats took chances and developed their own style. They didn't copy.

You transform all those who are touched by You.