Every time I copy something, I can draw it for the rest of my life. But research is so painful - I mean just opening up a magazine looking for a picture of a car or looking out the window looking for a car is just hard!

Man is a Religious Animal. He is the only Religious Animal. He is the only animal that has the True Religion - several of them. He is the only animal that loves his neighbor as himself and cuts his throat if his theology isn't straight. He has made a graveyard of the globe in trying his honest best to smooth his brother's path to happiness and heaven.

Mark Twain

He always looked forward to the evening drives through the centre of Shanghai, this electric and lurid city, more exciting than any other in the world. As they reached the Bubbling Well Road he pressed his face to the windshield and gazed at the pavements lined with night-clubs and gambling dens, crowded with bar-girls and gangsters and rich beggars with their bodyguards. Crowds of gamblers pushed their way into the jai alai stadiums, blocking the traffic in the Bubbling Well Road. An armoured police van with two Thompson guns mounted in a steel turret above the driver swung in front of the Packard and cleared the pavement. A party of young Chinese women in sequinned dresses tripped over a child's coffin decked with paper flowers. Arms linked together, they lurched against the radiator grille of the Packard and swayed past Jim's window, slapping the windshield with their small hands and screaming obscenities. Nearby, along the windows of the Sun Sun department store in the Nanking Road, a party of young European jews were fighting in and out of the strolling crowds with a gang of older German boys in the swastika armbands of the Graf Zeppelin Club. Chased by the police sirens, they ran through the entrance of the Cathay Theatre, the world's largest cinema, where a crowd of Chinese shopgirls and typists, beggars and pickpockets spilled in the street to watch people arriving for the evening performance. As they stepped from their limousines the women steered their long skirts through the honour guard of fifty hunchbacks in mediaeval costume. Three months earlier, when his parents had taken Jim to the premiere of The Hunchback of Notre Dame, there had been two hundred hunchbacks, recruited by the management of the theatre from every back alley in Shanghai. As always, the spectacle outside the theatre for exceeded anything shown on its screen.

J. G. Ballard, Empire of the Sun

All, or the greatest part of men that have aspired to riches or power, have attained thereunto either by force or fraud, and what they have by craft or cruelty gained, to cover the foulness of their fact, they call purchase, as a name more honest. Howsoever, he that for want of will or wit useth not those means, must rest in servitude and poverty.

Sir Walter Raleigh

No woman needs intercourse; few women escape it.

Andrea Dworkin

Seems to me that this business, for actors anyway, is not so much about whether or not you do good work. It's about whether or not you get the chance to do good work.

Hugh Laurie

It's amazing how easy the truth is to accept...No matter how strange.

K.C. Randall

My kids say if there's any family dinner that doesn't result in somebody crying, it's not a good dinner. They cry because it helps relieve them of a guilt or some onerous emotional burden. It's like a family tradition.

William Shatner

The social sciences, I thought, needed the same kind of rigor and the same mathematical underpinnings that had made the hard sciences so brilliantly successful.

Herbert Simon

I don't walk off and come back for encores. I figure I can add four weeks to my life that way.

Colin Hay

Let us therefore continue our triumphal march to the realization of the American dream. for all of us today, the battle is in our hands. The road ahead is not altogether a smooth one. There are no broad highways that lead us easily and inevitably to quick solutions. We are still in for the season of suffering. How long? Not long. Because no lie can live forever. Our God is marching on.

Martin Luther King, Jr.

The confusion is not my invention. We cannot listen to a conversation for five minutes without being aware of the confusion. It is all around us and our only chance now is to let it in. The only chance of renovation is to open our eyes and see the mess. It is not a mess you can make sense of.

Samuel Beckett, interview, Tom F

Wise living consists perhaps less in acquiring good habits than in acquiring as few habits as possible.

Eric Hoffer