We wanted the freedom to love. We wanted the freedom to choose. Now we have to fight for it.

Live free or die.

Perfection is a promise, and a reassurance that we are not wrong.

He is no longer mine to lose, but the grief is there, a gnawing sense of disbelief.

And you can't love, not fully, unless you are loved in return.

But maybe happiness isn't in the choosing. Maybe it's in the fiction, in the pretending: that wherever we have ended up is where we intended to be all along.

I don't understand how everything changes, how the layers of your life get buried. Impossible. At some point, at some time, we must all explode.

For a second, I feel a sense of overwhelming grief: for how things change, for the fact that we can never go back. I'm not certain of anything anymore. I don't know what will happen--

This is the past: It drifts, it gathers. If you are not careful, it will bury you.

That is the rule of the Wilds: You must be bigger and stronger and tougher. You must hurt or be hurt.

We are all punished for the lives we have chosen, in one way or another.

Our thinking makes our life

My second novel, "Good Benito", was not finished. I wished that I had spent another year with it.

Classical education has deformed everything, and has imposed upon us as geniuses men of correct, facile talent, who follow the beaten track.

There are so many good ones to paint and if you paint as well as you really can and keep out of all other things and do that, it is the true thing.

No man is a success in business unless he loves his work.

Man is free, but his freedom ceases when he has no faith in it[.

My interest is not data, it's the world. And part of world development you can see in numbers. Others, like human rights, empowerment of women, it's very difficult to measure in numbers.

Even though we want huge individual egos, our collective ego is unbelievable.

But the trouble is that he [Alan Greenspan] had been an Ayn Rander. You can take the boy out of the cult but you can't take the cult out of the boy.

The strength of democratic societies relies on their capacity to know how to stand firm against extremism while respecting justice in the means used to fight terrorism.