You were once wild here. Don't let them tame you.

Any intelligent woman who reads the marriage contract, and then goes into it, deserves all the consequences.

The dancer's body is simply the luminous manifestation of the soul.

The finest inheritance you can give to a child is to allow it to make its own way, completely on its own feet.

It seems to me monstrous that anyone should believe that the jazz rhythm expresses America. Jazz rhythm expresses the primitive savage.

What one has not experienced, one will never understand in print.

Perhaps he was a bit different from other people, but what really sympathetic person is not a little mad?

The first essential in writing about anything is that the writer should have no experience of the matter.

It has taken me years of struggle, hard work and research to learn to make one simple gesture, and I know enough about the art of writing to realize that it would take as many years of concentrated effort to write one simple, beautiful sentence.

Most human beings today waste some 25 to 30 years of their lives before they break through the actual and conventional lies which surround them.

You were once wild here. Don't let them tame you.

Art is not necessary at all. All that is necessary to make this world a better place to live in is to love - to love as Christ loved, as Buddha loved.

So long as little children are allowed to suffer, there is no true love in this world.

People don't live nowadays: they get about ten percent out of life.

The real American type can never be a ballet dancer. The legs are too long, the body too supple and the spirit too free for this school of affected grace and toe walking.

While we ourselves are the living graves of murdered animals, how can we expect any ideal living conditions on this earth?

So that ends my first experience of matrimony, which I always thought a highly over-rated performance.

My motto - sans limites.

With what price we pay for the glory of motherhood.

We may not all break the Ten Commandments, but we are certainly all capable of it. Within us lurks the breaker of all laws, ready to spring out at the first real opportunity.

Dance is the movement of the universe concentrated in an individual.

It is only in romances that people undergo a sudden metamorphosis. In real life, even after the most terrible experiences, the main character remains exactly the same.

Progress is a choice.

The great secret of success is to go through life as a man who never gets used up.

The only thing a cat worries about is what's happening right now. As we tell the kittens, you can only wash one paw at a time.

Real friendship is shown in times of trouble; prosperity is full of friends.

The frame of a soul was never made for fame. The frame of a soul was made to serve.

I wrote poetry, journals, and, especially, plays for the neighborhood kids to perform. I had an ordinary, happy childhood. Nothing much was going on, but I had fun.

There is no object so soft but it makes a hub for the wheeled universe.

I have always been more interested in experiment, than in accomplishment.

I have never been able to grasp the meaning of time. I don't believe it exists. I've felt this again and again, when alone and out in nature. On such occasions, time does not exist. Nor does the future exist.

When your time comes to die, be not like those whose hearts are filled with fear of death, so that when their time comes they weep and pray for a little more time to live their lives over again in a different way. Sing your death song, and die like a hero going home.

I was elected to come to an incredibly dysfunctional capital and make the government work better, and that's what I'm doing.

To be honest, I think I'd become a bit selfish with memories of my father. I wanted to hug them close to me.

The ultimate search engine would basically understand everything in the world, and it would always give you the right thing. And we're a long, long ways from that.

Most people who make threats don't follow through. The most dangerous people are often those who never make threats. But 'most' and 'often' aren't what you are looking for when you're dealing with a scary person. You want to 'know.' And there is no knowing.

Books are finished.

I imagine I was supposed to become a lawyer or something. But this was the Depression; the lawyers I saw were all driving cabs. So I thought, 'Well, if I'm going to be badly off anyway, I might as well be badly off in the theater, where you get used to it.'

You'd be surprised how difficult it is relinquish a cell phone.

Most horses dont walk backwards voluntarily because what they cant see doesnt exist.

Women, it turns out, are built to lead - particularly in the modern world.

My work is always very geometric.

As he enters his final term, with the elegiac music playing out there in the distance, Barack Obama will use the history that he has come to embody and, perhaps, even to fulfill, as part of a larger project that never will be completed but only finished, over and over again.

There is a certain age at which a child looks at you in all earnestness and delivers a long, pleased speech in all the true inflections of spoken English, but with not one recognizable syllable.

When I first read Anne Frank's 'Diary of a Young Girl,' I saw for the first time that a girl could be a writer and that it had something to do with survival and with ethics and fighting against evil. I admired her, though her diary remained terrifying and mysterious to me. She was a character in a real fairy tale - fairy tales are brutal.

I was a careless Protestant, my wife was a good Catholic, and we had six kids in seven years and I'd endorse that to everyone.