I don't particularly have any magical ambitions, but then, I never did. I just enjoyed the game.

I don't get many hecklers now but answering them is an art form in itself.

You'll like this, not a lot, but you'll like it.

When people say to me don't the years go fast I have to be honest and say that whereas I don't realise where they go in the long term, I pack so much into a year it seems to take forever.

I am still working on patter and presentation.

I don't particularly have any magical ambitions, but then, I never did. I just enjoyed the game.

Even though the vast majority of my work was outside television, the amount of creation and inventing that went into the TV shows was non stop and, unknown to me, a great strain.

After all, life hasn't much to offer except youth, and I suppose for older people, the love of youth in others.

I had a ninth grade teacher who told me I was much smarter and much better than I was allowing myself to be.

I like having my hands in the clay. I like the movie-making process.

Before I had decided to get into politics, I was laying the groundwork to have a career in the law, but that was really to lay the foundation to teach, either at the college level or law school level after my federal clerkships.

I don't want to think that anything is off limits for me to write about, but I also don't want to intrude on anybody's life, which is why there's very little specificity or names in the songs I write.

I didn't know I was a slave until I found out I couldn't do the things I wanted.

I teach a lecture course on American poetry to as many as 150 students. For a lot of them, it's their only elective, so this is their one shot. They'll take the Russian Novel or American Poetry, so I want to give them the high points, the inescapable poets.

It's so, so awful for my entire body and my spine and my hands, and I have a perfectly good desk to write at, but I don't care. I love writing in bed.

Eccentric men have peculiar habits; they do not seem to move in the same sphere with other mortals, but are actuated by different influences from those which affect the bulk of mankind.

Ninety-nine percent of the music that was of any interest to me when I was growing up came out of the black community.

Whoever does not miss the Soviet Union has no heart. Whoever wants it back has no brain.

I always start from scratch with a character - they're never based on anyone else. You get ideas of what people look like, and I'm a great people watcher. You can draw inspiration from people.

I know me, and those close to me know me. But sadly, the outside world thinks I'm some kind of a crook.

I maintain that nothing useful and lasting can emerge from violence.

I make up a new dance move. Its called the move on with your life.

I've decided to do what I want to do in life and follow my own path as an artist, so I've decided not to participate in any sort of nostalgia in which I'm marginalized as a pop icon of yesteryear.

When you go looking for rescue, you end up trapped in your own weakness.

Analysts may be correct that the presidential election won't primarily turn on entitlements reform, but by choosing Paul Ryan as his running mate, Mitt Romney can, contrary to conventional wisdom, make it a winning issue and lay the foundation for a reform mandate when he wins.

A surprising number of scientific advances have been made and masterpieces of art created by individuals just on the threshold of adulthood.

I am the wisest man alive, for I know one thing, and that is that I know nothing.

I was meant to date the captain of the football team, I was going to be on a romantic excursion every Saturday night, I was destined to be collecting corsages from every boy in town before prom, accepting such floral offerings like competing sacrifices to a Delphic goddess.

I'm thankful to be breathing, on this side of the grass. Whatever comes, comes.

I've gotten to a place where I really am just settled. Really.

The imagination is man's power over nature.