I am alone here in New York, no longer a we.

Nature should have been pleased to have made this age miserable, without making it also ridiculous.

The fifties - they seem to have taken place on a sunny afternoon that asked nothing of you except a drifting belief in the moment and its power to satisfy.

Adversity is a great teacher, but this teacher makes us pay dearly for its instruction; and often the profit we derive, is not worth the price we paid.

The language of the younger generation has the brutality of the city and an assertion of threatening power at hand, not to come. It is military, theatrical, and at its most coherent probably a lasting repudiation of empty courtesy and bureaucratic euphemism.

Books give not wisdom where none was before. But where some is, there reading makes it more.

The greatest gift is a passion for reading. It is cheap, it consoles, it distracts, it excites, it gives you knowledge of the world and experience of a wide kind. It is a moral illumination.

I am alone here in New York, no longer a we.

The greatest gift is a passion for reading.

And I also thought that Richard Nixon was the greatest political education we have ever had, but it looks like we need to relearn them again.

I like characters who remind me of someone I know.

We have a problem when the same people who make the law get to decide whether or not they themselves have broken the law.

The grandest ambition that any man can possibly have is to so live and so improve himself in heart and brain as to be worthy of the love of some splendid woman; and the grandest ambition of any girl is to make herself worthy of the love and adoration of some magnificent man.

Anything that controls my state of mind I never really want to do because I always want to be under control. That might be part of me being a Virgo. I never want to do something that stops me from being in control of who I am and my actions.

I write plays for people who wouldn't be seen dead in the theatre.

Very, very broadly speaking, you can put directors into two areas: One for whom you work, and the other with whom you work. And I prefer the latter, for obvious reasons. It's a great relief to feel that you're working with someone rather than for someone.

Death is not the end Death can never be the end. Death is the road. Life is the traveller. The Soul is the Guide our mind thinks of death. Our heart thinks of life our soul thinks of Immortality.

My concentration span is truly that of a gnat. Some people have this ladder, and that's all there is - the ladder. I have the ladder, too, but there's a building around it with scaffolding, and lots of windows for me to peek into. Then suddenly I'll remember, 'Oh, there's the ladder. I should be concentrating on that.'

I love jotting down ideas for my blog, so I doodle or take notes on all kinds of stuff that inspires me: the people I meet, boutiques I visit, a florist that just gave me a great idea for an interior-design project, things like that.

Having worked for him in the nuclear weapons policy business, I can tell you that President Reagan was committed to assuring the effectiveness of our nuclear deterrent.

The turning points of lives are not the great moments. The real crises are often concealed in occurrences so trivial in appearance that they pass unobserved.

When I'm in a place like Iceland, I allow myself to take a little more time to divert off onto other paths creatively for a while and see what comes to me.

I believe gay, straight, anybody, everybody's supposed to be happy in this world, man.

My fear was not of death itself, but a death without meaning.

What I would like to do is a thriller. I've been wanting to do that for a long time, but one that was not at all dependent on special effects. Just purely psychological, but will scare the hell out of you. That's what I would like to do. I have not found it yet.

I work out two, two and a half hours a day. For 'Immortals,' it was body-weight stuff: crunches, pullups, and martial arts-based cardio.

Oregonians aren't the only ones who recognize the extraordinary service and sacrifice of their state's National Guard.

Sometimes I worked with just a background of a rock or a tree or black velvet, and just had to imagine the whole thing.

We are a big family; we are all very close, and we always want to talk about what is going on with each other.

I always considered technical musicianship as something you should be ashamed of - I don't know why.

There can be no unified southeastern Europe without Yugoslavia, and everything else is a continuation of political blackmail with which the Serb people and Yugoslavia were faced all these years.

Any skills that I have, I couldn't really make money with them. I would like to think that maybe I would be doing something in psychology or something of that nature because I love that vein of medicine - the getting down and getting nitty-gritty.

I have no definite talent or trade, and how I stay alive is largely a matter of magic.