To say that an idea is fashionable is to say, I think, that it has been adulterated to a point where it is hardly an idea at all.

A political convention is just not a place where you come away with any trace of faith in human nature.

A critic is someone who enters the battlefield after the war is over and shoots the wounded.

No great scoundrel is ever uninteresting.

There is a raging tiger inside every man whom God put on this earth. Every man worthy of the respect of his children spends his life building inside himself a cage to pen that tiger in.

America... an economic system prouder of the distribution of its products than of the products themselves.

It is not the least of a martyr's scourges to be canonized by the persons who burned him.

It is function of government to invent philosophies to explain the demands of its own convenience.

To say that an idea is fashionable is to say, I think, that is has been adulterated to a point where it is hardly an idea at all.

The world of shabby gentility is like no other; its sacrifices have less logic, its standards are harsher, its relation to reality is dimmer than comfortable property or plain poverty can understand.

The beauty of a strong, lasting commitment is often best understood by a man incapable of it.

Maybe Heaven will be a library and then I might get to finish my ‘to-read’ list.

Sometimes God asks us to take a step before he confirms the course.

I didn’t answer her. All I could have said was I don’t know, a sentence that was becoming a kind of witness to our own ignorance or incompetence. Or both.

When one was full of energy and enthusiasm the world was an apple, the future was way beyond the horizon and only the present was pertinent.

No matter how rudely someone treats you, remain kind. Walking away at peace with yourself is worth it.

For whose sake, henceforth, all his vows be such, As what he loves may never like too much.

I think in many ways what my films are about is that search for my grandpa's dentures: for that humanizing narrative that bridges the gap between "us" and "them" to arrive at a "we."

The menu de degustation is the finest expression of avant-garde cooking.

For students who are in the most creative group in America to somehow be presumed to be narrow is just completely meshugga.

You got to be yourself, you got to discard all the bull and get YOU across ... and get what you have to say across.