Americans. They came right out with things. Hitchens family lore related the tale of how once, when I was but a toddler, my parents were passing with me through an airport and ran into some Yanks. 'Real cute kid,' said these big and brash people without troubling to make a formal introduction. They insisted on photographing me and, before breaking off to resume their American lives, pressed into my dimpled fist a signed dollar bill in token of my cuteness. This story was often told (I expect that Yvonne and the Commander had been to an airport together perhaps three times in their lives) and always with a note of condescension. That was Americans for you: wanting to be friendly all right, but so loud, and inclined to flash the cash.

Behind every great fortune lies a great crime.

Honore de Balzac

I wanted to be a doctor in sports medicine I was into sailing and all that sort of thing.

Christopher Atkins

Women are wiser than men because they know less and understand more.

James Thurber

The smart thing in the art world is to have one good idea and never have another.

Brian Eno

To make us love our country, our country ought to be lovely.

Edmund Burke

The doctor has been taught to be interested not in health but in disease. What the public is taught is that health is the cure for disease.

Ashley Montagu

I always wanted to be a Californian. In my wildest dreams, I always liked California - it's the place where oranges grows on trees! Fruit just falls off the trees.

Eric Burdon

I love and always have loved policy issues and trying to have an impact on the issues that are out there. I cherish my years in government. I have loved my participation at CNN, at Current writing teaching. Where I will go next, I will have to sort out.

Eliot Spitzer

All humanity is passion; without passion, religion, history, novels, art would be ineffectual.

Honore de Balzac

I am content to live it all again And yet again, if it be life to pitch Into the frog-spawn of a blind man's ditch, A blind man battering blind men; Or into that most fecund ditch of all, The folly that man does Or must suffer, if he woos A proud woman not kindred of his soul.

William Butler Yeats

I feel so lucky to have both a son and a daughter, because there's a different relationship with each of them.

Hugh Jackman

When we do the best that we can, we never know what miracle is wrought in our life, or in the life of another.

Helen Keller