Hot weather opens the skull of a city, exposing its white brain, and its heart of nerves, which sizzle like the wires inside a lightbulb. And there exudes a sour extra-human smell that makes the very stone seem flesh-alive, webbed and pulsing.

The first time I jumped from a plane, I screamed like a woman. I was two miles up and you could hear me clear as day. Now I love it.

Wesley Snipes

When a gifted team dedicates itself to unselfish trust and combines instinct with boldness and effort, its ready to climb.

Pat Riley

Well, as Hannah Arendt famously said, there can be a banal aspect to evil. In other words, it doesn't present always. I mean, often what you're meeting is a very mediocre person. But nonetheless, you can get a sort of frisson of wickedness from them. And the best combination of those, I think, I describe him in the book, is/was General Jorge Rafael Videla of Argentina, who I met in the late 1970s when the death squad war was at its height, and his fellow citizens were disappearing off the street all the time. And he was, in some ways, extremely banal. I describe him as looking like a human toothbrush. He was a sort of starch, lean officer with a silly mustache, and a very stupid look to him, but a very fanatical glint as well. And, if I'd tell you why he's now under house arrest in Argentina, you might get a sense of the horror I felt as I was asking him questions about all this. He's in prison in Argentina for selling the children of the rape victims among the private prisoners, who he kept in a personal jail. And I don't know if I've ever met anyone who's done anything as sort of condensedly horrible as that.

Christopher Hitchens

It's like I understand images and some people understand poetry.

Samantha Morton

The butterfly counts not months but moments, and has time enough.

Rabindranath Tagore

Well, if Fortune be a woman, she's a good wench for this gear.

William Shakespeare

Christmas gives us the opportunity to pause and reflect on the important things around us - a time when we can look back on the year that has passed and prepare for the year ahead.

David Cameron

Faith, to my mind, is a stiffening process, a sort of mental starch, which ought to be applied as sparingly as possible.

E. M. Forster

I dress for the image. Not for myself, not for the public, not for fashion, not for men.

Marlene Dietrich

Kids are meeting in coffee shops and basements figuring out what's unsustainable in their communities. That's the future.

Ian Somerhalder

That's the way this business works: if your movies do well at the box office, you will be offered more movies. It doesn't matter if you're a nice guy or you're a prick. If your movies do well, there's a job waiting for you in Hollywood. It's not any more complicated than that.

Matt Damon

I had two family members involved in World War I: two great-uncles. One of them is on a memorial in France. And the other was a trench runner who survived the war. The average life span of a trench runner was 36 hours, but he survived the whole war.

Ben Barnes