This desire to fashion, to shape, a self and a life has all but gone from a contemporary culture whose emphasis, paradoxically enough, is so much on self.

We are at heart so profoundly anarchistic that the only form of state we can imagine living in is Utopian; and so cynical that the only Utopia we can believe in is authoritarian.

Immature artists imitate. Mature artists steal.

Where misunderstanding serves others as an advantage, one is helpless to make oneself understood.

Being a Jew is like walking in the wind or swimming: you are touched at all points and conscious everywhere.

The poet is in command of his fantasy, while it is exactly the mark of the neurotic that he is possessed by his fantasy.

What marks the artist is his power to shape the material of pain we all have.

It is now life and not art that requires the willing suspension of disbelief.

Unless we insist that politics is imagination and mind, we will learn that imagination and mind are politics, and of a kind we will not like.

It is possible that the contemplation of cruelty will not make us humane but cruel; that the reiteration of the badness of our spiritual condition will make us consent to it.

The immature artist imitates. The mature artist steals.

My fear drives me. My faith directs me. I am an entrepreneur.

The institution that had the greatest effect on Berenson's education was the Boston public library, the first in the country that allowed people to take books home to read them.

Hand in hand with freedom of speech goes the power to be heard, to share in the decisions of government which shape men's lives.

[Golfers] are a special kind of moral realist who nips the normal romantic and idealistic yearnings in the bud by proving once or twice a week that life is unconquerable but endurable.

Because if I don't know my lines, I really don't know what I'm doing.

If by religion we mean a belief in humanity rather than the gods, an effort to make man better and a little happier, then yes, I'm very religious.

The voices blend and fuse in clouded silence: silence that is infinite of space: and swiftly, silently the sound is wafted over regions of cycles of cycles of generations that have lived.

Thomas Edison's last words were 'It's very beautiful over there'. I don't know where there is, but I believe it's somewhere, and I hope it's beautiful.

Try to realize all the blessings you have, and you will find perhaps that they are more than you suppose.

Did they know - the young and fearless - what a miraculous thing it was to have all of anyone?