Yeah, don't you take a break?" "I don't have time for breaks." "That's the whole point of a break. When you've got no time, you need a break.

We are, at almost every point of our day, immersed in cultural diversity: faces, clothes, smells, attitudes, values, traditions, behaviours, beliefs, rituals.

Sometimes it's easy to lose faith in people. And sometimes one act of kindness is all it takes to give you hope again.

When it comes to the hijab - why to wear it, whether to wear it, how to wear it - there is theology and then there is practice, and there is huge diversity in both.

Belief means nothing without actions

What’s the good of being true to your religion on the outside, if you don’t change what’s on the inside,were it really counts ?

In a multicultural, diverse society there are countless ways in which people negotiate the everyday lived experience and reality of diversity.

But persistent name calling? that prolongs hurt. It stretches out. Each nasty word stretches the rubber band further away until finally, one day, it snaps back at you with maximum impact

True friends are those who love you not in spite of your faults and imperfections, but because of them.

The easiest way for readers to connect with characters and feel sympathy is to make the character entertaining, sympathetic and likeable.

When you exist in the centre of a debate, as a topic, a hypothesis - otherised and stigmatised - you become the prop in a proposition.

Give me health and a day, and I will make the pomp of emperors ridiculous.

I love really kitschy bad movies. Showgirls is one of my favorites. I saw House of Versace and died. I'm a big fan of made-for-TV movies because those are instant classics, naturally.

People refuse to believe that I've never been to Starbucks or Disneyland.

Enthusiasm is the great hill-climber.

Aaron Copland was a man that had a very specific point of view about what music should be which was that, he felt that new music should have the composer should show a personality in his music.

The American government is making nuclear weapons like there's no tomorrow.

Solitude is a silent storm that breaks down all our dead branches; yet it sends our living roots deeper into the living heart of the living earth.

We had to restructure our military and our politics and so on. We're a new democracy. We're a nascent democracy.

Is a hippopotamus a hippopotamus or just a really cool opotamus?

I made a conscious decision to earn enough to be able to choose my husband rather than not have a career and marry someone who would have to earn enough for us both to live on.