Morality must guide calculation, and calculation must guide politics.
I write because I like to write. I find joy in the texture and tone and rhythm of words. It is a satisfaction like that which follows good and shared love.
With all our horrors and faults, somewhere in us there is a shining.
The redwoods, once seen, leave a mark or create a vision that stays with you always. No one has ever successfully painted or photographed a redwood tree. The feeling they produce is not transferable. From them comes silence and awe. It's not only their unbelievable stature, nor the color which seems to shift and vary under your eyes, no, they are not like any trees we know, they are ambassadors from another time.
And, of course, people are interested only in themselves. If a story is not about the hearer he will not listen.
The camera need not be a cold mechanical device. Like the pen, it is as good as the man who uses it. It can be the extension of mind and heart.
Writers are a little below clowns and a little above trained seals.
The machine code of the genes is uncannily computer-like. Apart from differences in jargon, the pages of a molecular biology journal might be interchanged with those of a computer engineering journal.
[Ginsburg's] feminism was very sweeping and very ambitious and very consistent. Justice O'Connor had a more case-by-case, pragmatic approach to her feminism. They were not entirely the same, [but] I think that they shared the most important thing, which is the belief that they were worthy and that therefore other women were worthy.
And now each night, I count the stars. And each night I get the same number. And when the stars won't come to be counted, I count the holes they leave.
White actors still get way more money in Hollywood. It's been that way for a very long time. I hope it'll change, but it's a matter of forcing that change.