An agent saw one of the plays I did at ACT, but my mom was like, No, she's too young. I became so annoying that a year and a half later she just couldn't stand hearing me any more!

I was 21 in 1968, so I'm as much a child of the '60s as is possible to be. In those years the subject of religion had really almost disappeared the idea that religion was going to be a major force in the life of our societies, in the West anyway, would have seemed absurd in 1968.

Salman Rushdie

The more I see of democracy the more I dislike it. It just brings everything down to the mere vulgar level of wages and prices, electric light and water closets, and nothing else.

D. H. (David Herbert) Lawrence

The sole and basic source of our strength is the solidarity of workers, peasants and the intelligentsia, the solidarity of the nation, the solidarity of people who seek to live in dignity, truth, and in harmony with their conscience.

Lech Walesa

Every time I get up in the morning, melodies occur to me and I start trying to shape lyrics to melodies.

Andrew Bird

Art should comfort the disturbed and disturb the comfortable.

Banksy

She's not classically beautiful, but somehow that only makes her more interesting.

Jodi Picoult

I don't have to run the Peace Corps. I could live without seeing my picture in the newspapers and without being interviewed.

Sargent Shriver

What one means by integrity, in the case of the novelist, is the conviction that he gives one that this is the truth. . . . When one so exposes it [integrity] and sees it come to life one exclaims in rapture, But this is what I have always felt and known and desired! And one boils over with excitement, and, shutting the book even with a kind of reverence as if it were something very precious, a stand-by to return to as long as one lives, one puts it back on the shelf.

Virginia Woolf

Expect poison from standing water.

William Blake

What's a philosopher?' said Brutha.Someone who's bright enough to find a job with no heavy lifting,' said a voice in his head.

Terry Pratchett

I suppose every old scholar has had the experience of reading something in a book which was significant to him, but which he could never find again. Sure he is that he read it there, but no one else ever read it, nor can he find it again, though he buy the book and ransack every page.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Everybody has to put purees underneath everything now. It's like people think we need the steak, and then we need some baby food with it.

Wolfgang Puck