I came to live in a country I love; some people label me a defector. I have loved men and women in my life; I've been labeled the bisexual defector. Want to know another secret? I'm even ambidextrous. I don't like labels. Just call me Martina.

Instead of asking 'How much damage will the work in question bring about?' why not ask 'How much good? How much joy?'

Henry Miller

Can we talk?

Joan Rivers

It's much easier to write when you're sad. But you can end up isolated and depressed because you almost need to put yourself in that situation to have that angst to write from.

Natalie Imbruglia

One of the curious things about censorship is that no one seems to want it for himself. We want censorship to protect someone else; the young, the unstable, the suggestible, the stupid. I have never heard of anyone who wanted a film banned because otherwise he might see it and be harmed.

Edgar Dale

The fight, this war, this fight against the remnants of terrorism will go on for some time.

Hamid Karzai

God speaks to me not through the thunder and the earthquake, nor through the ocean and the stars, but through the Son of Man, and speaks in a language adapted to my imperfect sight and hearing.

William Lyon Phelps

Doing research on the Web is like using a library assembled piecemeal by pack rats and vandalized nightly.

Roger Ebert

The public make use of the classics of a country as a means of checking the progress of Art. They degrade the classics into authorities.... A fresh mode of Beauty is absolutely distasteful to them, and whenever it appears they get so angry and bewildered that they always use two stupid expressions--one is that the work of art is grossly unintelligible; the other, that the work of art is grossly immoral. What they mean by these words seems to me to be this. When they say a work is grossly unintelligible, they mean that the artist has said or made a beautiful thing that is new; when they describe a work as grossly immoral, they mean that the artist has said or made a beautiful thing that is true.

Oscar Wilde

The sacrifices of friendship were beautiful in her eyes as long as she was not asked to make them.

Hector Hugh Munro

The teacher reminded us that Romes liberties were not auctioned off in a day, but were bought slowly, gradually, furtively, little by little; first with a little corn and oil for the exceedingly poor and wretched, later with corn and oil for voters who were not quite so poor, later still with corn and oil for pretty much every man that had a vote to sellexactly our own history over again.

Mark Twain

Art arises when the secret vision of the artist and the manefestation of nature agree to find new shapes.

Kahlil Gibran

I kept my age quiet for a good few years. I didn't see it as a positive. I worked remotely, so I just didn't tell people.

Pete Cashmore