The minute you settle for less than you deserve, you get even less than you settled for.

Celebrity distorts democracy by giving the rich, beautiful, and famous more authority than they deserve.

One must not attempt to justify them, but rather to sense their nature simply and clearly.

Wooing the press is an exercise roughly akin to picnicking with a tiger. You might enjoy the meal, but the tiger always eats last.

The minute you settle for less than you deserve, you get even less than you settled for.

And as far as doing God's work, I think the bankers who took government money and then gave out obscene bonuses are the same self-interested sorts Jesus threw out of the temple.

As a woman, I know that if I write about another woman, it will be perceived as a catfight.

Digital platforms are worthless without content. They're shiny sacks with bells and whistles, but without content, they're empty sacks. It is not about pixels versus print. It is not about how you're reading. It is about what you're reading.

Eric Schmidt looks innocent enough, with his watercolor blue eyes and his tiny office full of toys and his Google campus stocked with volleyball courts and unlocked bikes and wheat-grass shots and cereal dispensers and Haribo Gummi Bears and heated toilet seats and herb gardens and parking lots with cords hanging to plug in electric cars.

Everybody is continuously connected to everybody else on Twitter, on Facebook, on Instagram, on Reddit, e-mailing, texting, faster and faster, with the flood of information jeopardizing meaning. Everybody's talking at once in a hypnotic, hyper din: the cocktail party from hell.

F.D.R. achieved greatness not by means of imposing his temperament and intellect on the world but by reacting to what the world threw at him.

I feel like I owe it to the readers to try to pull back the veil and give them the honest version of what's going on. But it's not more fun. If Obama, as he does sometimes already, gets a little snippy with me about something I've written, you're thinking, 'Oh God, the president of the United States is already annoyed with me.'

I'm into clothes, but in a way that's related to wanting to walk into a film noir movie. You know, I love to go to vintage stores, but mostly it's stuff that I don't have anywhere to wear... I don't have the life that goes with the clothes.

It takes a lot of adrenaline and fear to make me actually write.

Journalism, spooked by rumors of its own obsolescence, has stopped believing in itself. Groans of doom alternate with panicked happy talk.

Maybe Obama was not even the person he was waiting for.

My eating habits were so bad for many years that I didn't actually know the intricacies of making a salad.

Obama invented himself against all odds and repeated parental abandonment, and he worked hard to regiment his emotions. But now that can come across as imperviousness and inflexibility. He wants to run the agenda; he doesn't want the agenda to run him. Once you become president, though, there's no way to predict what your crises will be.

Obama sees himself as such a huge change that he can be cautious about other societal changes. But what he doesn't realize is that legalizing gay marriage is like electing a black president. Before you do it, it seems inconceivable. Once it's done, you can't remember what all the fuss was about.

Reagan didn't socialize with the press. He spent his evenings with Nancy, watching TV with dinner trays. But he knew that to transcend, you can't condescend.

The C.E.O. of Google doesn't look like a Dick Cheney World Domination sort whom we should worry about as Google ogles our houses, our oceans, our foibles, our movements and our tastes.

The Obamas, especially Michelle, have radiated the sense that Americans do not appreciate what they sacrifice by living in a gilded cage. They've forgotten Rule No. 1 of politics: No one sheds tears for anyone lucky enough to live at the White House.

The guilty pleasure I miss most when I'm out slogging on the campaign trail is the chance to sprawl on the chaise and watch a vacuously spunky and generically sassy chick flick.

Washington is a place where people have always been suspect of style and overt sexuality. Too much preening signals that you're not up late studying cap-and-trade agreements.

We are supposed to believe that every dollar given to a Clinton is a dollar that improves the world. But is it? Clintonworld is a galaxy where personal enrichment and political advancement blend seamlessly, and where a cast of jarringly familiar characters pad their pockets every which way to Sunday.

When you go into a fight saying you're probably going to lose, you're probably going to lose.

Why can't Google, which likes to see itself as a 'Don't Be Evil' benevolent force in society, just write us a big check for using our stories, so we can keep checks and balances alive and continue to provide the search engine with our stories?

When I'm in 'Man vs. Wild' mode, it's not pleasure. Every sensor is firing and I'm on reserve power all the time and I'm digging deep - and that's the magic of it as well, and that's raw and it's great.

There's an old hymn called 'How Can I Keep from Singing?' That's what writing feels like to me. I have to write. It's intrinsic to who I am. So it was a natural choice for me to try to pursue writing as a career. Truthfully, though, I still daydream about how fun it would be to ride on the back of a garbage truck.

Music expresses what cannot be put into words I like to think, and I think the band makes a good go at it.

So many people walk around with a meaningless life. They seem half-asleep, even when they're busy doing things they think are important. This is because they're chasing the wrong things.

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

I didn't know who was on the team, but I saw every eye as I walked down the aisle. It looked like a thousand eyes were staring right at me saying, 'Who is this young punk?' I just kept my eyes straight ahead.

One of the odd things about being a writer is that you never reach a point of certainty, a point of mastery where you can say, 'Right. Now I understand how this is done.'

I was so surprised because I'm not too sure whether I could win a Nobel Prize, you know, because basically, physics, it means that usually people was awarded for the invention of the basic theory. But in my case, not a basic theory, in my case just making the device, you know.

I always said there's no way I'd work in America because I'm too weird and I'm too old, but somehow it's happened.

I think on some level, you do your best things when you're a little off-balance, a little scared. You've got to work from mystery, from wonder, from not knowing.

When you stand outside you look around and find that the people youre with live on the fringes.

If you accept the expectations of others, especially negative ones, then you never will change the outcome.

The best work of literature to represent the American Dream is 'The Great Gatsby' by F. Scott Fitzgerald. It shows us how dreaming can be tainted by reality, and that if you don't compromise, you may suffer.

I grew up being very shy, very much a bookworm, and I remember desperately wondering how to be accepted by the popular kids.

My father's family came from Virginia and Philadelphia. He wasn't a brother who talked a lot. He was a workingman, a quiet, blue-collar dude.

It is better to meet danger than to wait for it. He that is on a lee shore, and foresees a hurricane, stands out to sea and encounters a storm to avoid a shipwreck.

It became obvious to me that the generation who changed the world were my parents' generation, and not only in terms of the Second World War, but if you look at all the social legislation of the '60s - abortion, homosexual law reform, equal pay - it wasn't done by my generation; it was done by people who were adults.

Perform your long and heavy task with energy treading the path to which Fate has been pleased to call you.

Better to be a desperate single with options than a desperate married with no options.

I was convinced there as only one actor to play Templeton the Rat, and that was Tony Randall.

Inside everybodys hiding something.

It's great that Maryland is tied for having the lowest wage gap between our working men and women of any state in the nation, but there's more work to do to eliminate that gap entirely.