Just about every children's book in my local bookstore has an animal for its hero. But then, only a few feet away in the cookbook section, just about every cookbook includes recipes for cooking animals. Is there a more illuminating illustration of our paradoxical relationship with the nonhuman world?

David was the kind of guy who was totally supportive of the actors and instructed the writing staff to trust the actor's instincts, since after all, it's the actors playing the character.

William Devane

Some persons are likable in spite of their unswerving integrity.

Don Marquis

Women thrive on novelty and are easy meat for the commerce of fashion. Men prefer old pipes and torn jackets.

Anthony Burgess, You've Had Your

It's like, now you're actually complaining because you're making $9 million and guys are making more? If it makes you that upset, quit. Leave the game. Go home then and try finding another job that's going to pay you that.

Eric Davis

You know, the period of World War I and the Roaring Twenties were really just about the same as today. You worked, and you made a living if you could, and you tired to make the best of things. For an actor or a dancer, it was no different then than today. It was a struggle.

James Cagney

Maybe we can show government how to operate better as a result of better architecture. Eventually, I think Chicago will be the most beautiful great city left in the world.

Frank Lloyd Wright

Nutrition science is where surgery was in about 1650, you know, really interesting and promising, but would you want to have them operate on you yet? I don't think so.

Michael Pollan

There's a boy whose affection I am determined to hunt down and kill. It used to be material objects I felt I needed to be happy. It would make me feel stable if I had him. If I had someone like him, it would prove that I'm stable, and then I wouldn't have to do the work to get there. I am constantly looking for ways to cede control of my worries to someone, anyone.

Emma Forrest

If good history is dispassionate history, it must naturally wait until the passions of the period subside.

James Buchan

I love the sad songs with their maudlin, self-deprecating, almost funny lyrics. As an Englishman, they make a lot of sense.

Teddy Thompson

If you're a leader, a fellow that other fellows look to, you've got to keep going.

Ernest Shackleton

It comes as no surprise to find [Norman] Mailer embracing [in the book ] a form of Manicheanism, pitting the forces of light and darkness against each other in a permanent stand-off, with humanity as the battlefield. (When asked if Jesus is part of this battle, he responds rather loftily that he thinks it is a distinct possibility.) But it is at points like this that he talks as if all the late-night undergraduate talk sessions on the question of theism had become rolled into one. 'How can we not face up to the fact that if God is All-Powerful, He cannot be All-Good. Or She cannot be All-Good.'Mailer says that questions such as this have bedevilled 'theologians', whereas it would be more accurate to say that such questions, posed by philosophers, have attempted to put theologians out of business. A long exchange on the probability of reincarnation (known to Mailer sometimes as karmic reassignment) manages to fall slightly below the level of those undergraduate talk sessions. The Manichean stand-off leads Mailer, in closing, to speculate on what God might desire politically and to say: 'In different times, the heavens may have been partial to monarchy, to communism, and certainly the Lord was interested in democracy, in capitalism. (As was the Devil!)'I think it was at this point that I decided I would rather remember Mailer as the author of and .

Christopher Hitchens