I don't know any other lifestyle. I get up in the morning and I really do feel that the world is my oyster, and I start that way, the same as I would if I were preparing to write a song: put a blank piece of paper up on the piano and you go for it.

We have abolished the death penalty for humans, so why should it continue for animals?

Brigitte Bardot

The 'kingdom of Heaven' is a condition of the heart - not something that comes 'upon the earth' or 'after death.'

Friedrich Nietzsche

Your imagination, my dear fellow, is worth more than you imagine.

Louis Aragon

What drew me to politics in the first place was the fact that I wanted to have a place to take a stand and use my voice to express what I believed in. But I've no longer got any political aspirations. I feel that as a politician, fifty per cent of people would hate you before you even left the house.

Jon Bon Jovi

Don't tell fish stories where the people know you; but particularly, don't tell them where they know the fish.

Mark Twain

Of the various forms of government which have prevailed in the world, an hereditary monarchy seems to present the fairest scope for ridicule.

Edward Gibbon

I think that is where poetry reading becomes such an individual thing. I mean I have friend who like poets who just don't say anything to me at all, I mean they seem to me rather ordinary and pedestrian.

James Laughlin

I love my gay male friends, but when I was a little girl, I always used to wish that I would be constantly surrounded by gorgeous guys, and I am, and I should have been more specific.

Margaret Cho

I lived to play basketball. Growing up as a kid, Bill Russell and the Boston Celtics were my favorite team. The way they played, the teamwork, the sacrifice, the commitment, the joy, the camaraderie, the relationship with the fans.

Bill Walton

A store of grain, Oh king is the best of treasures. A gem put in your mouth will not support life.

Hitopadesa

It was as easy as breathing to go and have tea near the place where Jane Austen had so wittily scribbled and so painfully died. One of the things that causes some critics to marvel at Miss Austen is the laconic way in which, as a daughter of the epoch that saw the Napoleonic Wars, she contrives like a Greek dramatist to keep it off the stage while she concentrates on the human factor. I think this comes close to affectation on the part of some of her admirers. Captain Frederick Wentworth in , for example, is partly of interest to the female sex because of the 'prize' loot he has extracted from his encounters with Bonaparte's navy. Still, as one born after Hiroshima I can testify that a small Hampshire township, however large the number of names of the fallen on its village-green war memorial, is more than a world away from any unpleasantness on the European mainland or the high or narrow seas that lie between. (I used to love the detail that Hampshire's 'New Forest' is so called because it was only planted for the hunt in the late eleventh century.) I remember watching with my father and brother through the fence of Stanstead House, the Sussex mansion of the Earl of Bessborough, one evening in the early 1960s, and seeing an immense golden meadow carpeted entirely by grazing rabbits. I'll never keep that quiet, or be that still, again.This was around the time of countrywide protest against the introduction of a horrible laboratory-confected disease, named 'myxomatosis,' into the warrens of old England to keep down the number of nibbling rodents. Richard Adams's lapine masterpiece is the remarkable work that it is, not merely because it evokes the world of hedgerows and chalk-downs and streams and spinneys better than anything since , but because it is only really possible to imagine gassing and massacre and organized cruelty on this ancient and green and gently rounded landscape if it is organized and carried out against herbivores.

Christopher Hitchens

I accepted the interviews and encounters that had to be held with the media, but I would have preferred to work in peace.

Naguib Mahfouz