Sometimes the poorest woman leaves her children the richest inheritance.
Nothing in a graduate degree in art history prepares you for the eloquence of the eraser.
The scale and the brutality of our prisons are the moral scandal of American life.
We breathe in our first language, and swim in our second.
The special virtue of freedom is not that it makes you richer and more powerful but that it gives you more time to understand what it means to be alive.
In an age of malice and bad faith on many sides, I reread White or Thurber or Mitchell and am reminded again that good writing is done, as I said in my elegy for Salinger, with an active eye and ear and an ardent heart, and in no other way.
Men choose Hamlet because every man sees himself as a disinherited monarch. Women choose Alice [in Wonderland] because every woman sees herself as the only reasonable creature among crazy people who think they are disinherited monarchs.
The great thing about being a broadcaster is you have this incredible responsibility to the people that make it all happen, the people that turn on the television set.
Mozart's mental grip never loosens; he never abandons himself to any one sense; even at his most ecstatic moments his mind is vigorous, alert, and on the wing. He dives unerringly on to his finest ideas like a bird of prey, and once an idea is seized he soars off again with an undiminished power.
I only go to Japan when there's someone who can afford to bring me there, and consequently I may never go again!
I don't really want to control anyone, to be honest.