Save the stonewall to build the levees.

Sometimes when you get in a fight with a skunk, you can't tell who started it.

Save the stonewall to build the levees.

Well, dissent is the tradition in America, and I've been on the side of dissent a good bit of my career, particularly in the last many years of the Republican Congress.

I've always loved the electric guitar: to hold it and work it and hear what it does is unreal.

The craftiest trickery are too short and ragged a cloak to cover a bad heart.

I have observed that money left without special guidance is sometimes used well and sometimes not.

See, I'm fortunate that I get around a lot because of my movie business.

I have been on diets that were supervised by doctors, that were carefully supervised where I lost weight.

One of the ready advantages of writing a road or quest story is that it mirrors the experience of writing a novel.

I live at the dentist's. I'm on my third set of teeth that they put in with nails and screws.

I try to make myself do things for other people when Im feeling down. Like you can call your local hospital and help out in the pediatric unit.

Believe you can and you're half way there.

Im an elephant today. I will need to have lots of room and also a bowl of water on the floor.

Virtually every scientist now concedes that universe and time itself had beginning. So, whatever begins to exist has a cause. The universe began to exist. Therefore, the universe must have had a cause.

I am a New Zealander, but I don't want to swallow New Zealand identity in one gulp.

If you write a book about a bygone period that lies east of the Mississippi River, then it's a historical novel. If it's west of the Mississippi, it's a western, a different category. There's no sense to it.

I think The Doors are one of the classic groups, and I think we're all tempted to feel like the time in which we grew up was somehow special, but I really do believe that there were two golden eras in music: The Forties and Fifties of big band, jazz and swing, and the Sixties and Seventies of rock. To me, they're really unparalleled.

I think intelligence is totally subjective; it's like sexiness.

You have doubtless heard, my dear mother, the misfortune of Madame de Chartres, whose child is born dead. But I would rather have even that, terrible as it is, than be as I am without hope of any children.

The beauty of reading is that it lets you travel in a way you could never know.

Hanging may seem barbarous, but the greater barbarity lies in the slow abandonment of our common law traditions.

I know I cannot do all the stuff that I did ten years ago.

There never was a good war, or a bad peace.

If you and I had a relationship, and I like to dance and you don't, will that affect our relationship? If I push you and push you, maybe you'll learn to dance, but more likely, that will move you away from me.

I don't think the biggest crime is to not sympathize with people. I think the biggest crime is to not be interested.

Anybody who has been seriously engaged in scientific work of any kind realizes that over the entrance to the gates of the temple of science are written the words: 'Ye must have faith.'

My mom worked for a doctor who had a pool that he heated to 90 degrees, and I hated cold water. My dad showed me how to dive in that pool, and pretty soon I started doing flips.