What we eat is the one simplest way to declare who we are - the table reflects our values with a clarity that few other theaters of human behaviour posses.

After all, spinning is its own reward. There wouldn't be carousels if it weren't so.

The scale and the brutality of our prisons are the moral scandal of American life.

We breathe in our first language, and swim in our second.

The special virtue of freedom is not that it makes you richer and more powerful but that it gives you more time to understand what it means to be alive.

The loneliness of the expatriate is of an odd and complicated kind, for it is inseparable from the feeling of being free, of having escaped.

Frauds master our minds; magicians, like poets and lovers, engage them in a permanent maze of possibilities.

What drives innovation is abundance and ease, not the pressure of scarcity.

Sometimes having a good time can be the outward evidence of a deep re-thinking.

Wit and puns aren't just décor in the mind; they're essential signs that the mind knows it's on, recognizes its own software, can spot the bugs in its own program.

Fanaticism comes in as many flavors as there are human beings.

You see, " she concluded miserably, "when I can call like that to him across space--I belong to him. He doesn't love me--he never will--but I belong to him.

Christmas is God being relentless to the point that He would die in that relentlessness.

For six months, then, Emma, at fifteen years of age, made her hands dirty with books from old lending libraries.

The newspapers! Sir they are the most villainous - licentious - abominable - infernal - not that I ever read them - no - I make it a rule never to look into a newspaper.

In those moments when priorities clash always stay guided by your values, not your perceived necessities.

Seek a happy marriage with wholeness of heart, but do not expect to reach the promised land without going through some wilderness together.

A lot of young actors will do a scene and then run off and look at themselves. I don't believe in that at all

I was single-minded and I had tunnel vision. Now it's time for a change.

I think that this performance with the Thingamajigs is going to be an exploration of the acoustic space and particularly the vertical space, which we don't think about so much.

...my basic belief about the making of stories is that they pretty much make themselves.