We live in a dominant culture of ceaseless Departure and Progress that has so far lasted two or three centuries.

The past grows gradually around one, like a placenta for dying.

We never look at just one thing; we are always looking at the relation between things and ourselves.

That we find a crystal or a poppy beautiful means that we are less alone, that we are more deeply inserted into existence than the course of a single life would lead us to believe.

We only see what we look at. To look is an act of choice.

The poverty of our century is unlike that of any other. It is not, as poverty was before, the result of natural scarcity, but of a set of priorities imposed upon the rest of the world by the rich.

To be desired is perhaps the closest anybody in this life can reach to feeling immortal.

Paris, I believe, is a man in his twenties in love with an older woman.

Men look at women. Women watch themselves being looked at.

The past is the one thing we are not prisoners of. We can do with the past exactly what we wish. What we can't do is to change its consequences.

The human imagination... has great difficulty in living strictly within the confines of a materialist practice or philosophy. It dreams, like a dog in its basket, of hares in the open.

Information wants to be free.

If you give your best and fail, you have no reason to be disappointed. If you don't give your best and fail, you have not right to be.

I’m a Brooklyn guy onstage, and I try to really feed my fans with the kind of material they expect from me.

I guess the reality is, everybody today has so many gadgets.

A lot of people have the ability, but they don't put forth the effort.

Nothing is so great an example of bad manners as flattery. If you flatter all the company, you please none; If you flatter only one or two, you offend the rest.

The idea that a good God would send people to a burning hell is utterly damnable to me - the raving of insanity, superstition gone to seed! I want no part of such a God.

If the lambs of the world had been willingly led, they would have long ago saved themselves from the butcher's knife.

To have acted otherwise ... would have been the betrayal of the interests of the United States.

Stalin and Mao killed over 80 million and did not make omelets despite the broken eggs.