A tiny radish of passionate scarlet, tipped modestly in white.

A tiny radish of passionate scarlet, tipped modestly in white.

Never grow a wishbone, daughter, where you backbone ought to be.

Beer is the Danish national drink, and the Danish national weakness is another beer.

Never grow a wishbone daughter where you backbone ought to be.

We all have hometown appetites. Every other person is a bundle of longing for the simplicities of good taste once enjoyed on the farm or in the hometown left behind.

Never grow a wishbone where your backbone ought to be.

And then when I went to Chicago, that's when I had these outer space experiences and went to the other planets.

My dad is Scottish, and he read in the newspaper about the plight of the Scottish Freshwater Mussel, which is a real thing - like, a very real, serious conservation issue. And he's a writer, and he was going to do a film about a Glaswegian gangster, and then I stole the idea and turned it into a romantic comedy.

I went to Colby College in Waterville, ME and did picture it when I was writing 'Cum Laude.' So many of the physical details were included, like the loop where people jogged. The story of the chapel is also borrowed from Colby... but the students and cast of characters are fictional.

Science and religion are both the same thing. They're there; they're life. If it's not science, it's not a fact.

I wanted to be a writer, but the idea of writing novels or movies seemed really intimidating. I never got more than a few pages into one.

My parents were working performers, so obviously I saw that there wasn't a lot of fairy tale going on there. It was a precarious world. One that they were deeply committed to and deeply loved, but one that required a lot of hard work.

This African American Vernacular English shares most of its grammar and vocabulary with other dialects of English. But it is distinct in many ways, and it is more different from standard English than any other dialect spoken in continental North America.

I think there's so much negative influence on children in school settings. It becomes learning by rote to pass a test. It's not contextualized.

Real genius is nothing else but the supernatural virtue of humility in the domain of thought.

You read a million scripts during pilot season, and most of them are not very good, so the good ones really shine.

People always assume that bachelors are single by choice and spinsters because nobody asked them. It never enters their heads that poor bachelors might have worn the knees of their trousers out proposing to girls who rejected them or that a girl might deliberately stay unmarried.

We all know the sense of comfort of which we are conscious when a good half of the floor space in a room is unencumbered; this seems to offer us the agreeable possibility of moving about freely.

The friend who can be silent with us in a moment of despair or confusion, who can stay with us in an hour of grief and bereavement, who can tolerate not knowing... not healing, not curing... that is a friend who cares.

I'm not yet fortunate enough to take only the scripts that capture my fancy, but each one has to be a new experience, to put me in a light that audiences haven't necessarily seen me before.

I'm incredibly neurotic and a control freak. I like the thought that if there's going to be anyone to blame it's going to be me.

Let it be understood, in the first place, that a science fiction story must be an exposition of a scientific theme and it must be also a story.

I cringe when I watch myself on TV.

I never wanted to go longer than five years off the stage. Not necessarily musicals, but just doing a play or something.

I think what makes us human - is our interconnectedness among people. It's our ability to form and maintain relationships. It's the barometer by which we call ourselves human.

A strong wind was blowing and it felt really very cold and seemed so unfamiliar and bizarre. But the trees remembered me. They bowed gently in the breez and called me nearer, welcoming me.

She looks like she combs her hair with an egg beater.

Ceremonies are important. But our gratitude has to be more than visits to the troops and once a year Memorial Day ceremonies. We honor the dead best by treating the living well.

My activism did not spring from my being gay, or, for that matter, from my being black. Rather, it is rooted fundamentally in my Quaker upbringing and the values that were instilled in me by my grandparents who reared me.

The worst thing in your life may contain the seeds of the best