Let me tell you a story. The day after Columbine, I was interviewed for the Tom Brokaw news program. The reporter had been assigned a theory and was seeking sound bites to support it. Wouldn't you say, she asked, that killings like this are influenced by violent movies? No, I said, I wouldn't say that. But what about 'Basketball Diaries'? She asked. Doesn't that have a scene of a boy walking into a school with a machine gun? The obscure 1995 Leonardo Di Caprio movie did indeed have a brief fantasy scene of that nature, I said, but the movie failed at the box office, and it's unlikely the Columbine killers saw it. The reporter looked disappointed, so I offered her my theory. Events like this, I said, if they are influenced by anything, are influenced by news programs like your own. When an unbalanced kid walks into a school and starts shooting, it becomes a major media event. Cable news drops ordinary programming and goes around the clock with it. The story is assigned a logo and a theme song; These two kids were packaged as the Trench Coat Mafia. The message is clear to other disturbed kids around the country: If I shoot up my school, I can be famous. The TV will talk about nothing else but me. Experts will try to figure out what I was thinking. The kids and teachers at school will see they shouldn't have messed with me. I'll go out in a blaze of glory.

All social rules and all relations between individuals are eroded by a cash economy, avarice drags Pluto himself out of the bowels of the earth.

Karl Marx

It's not what I'd want for at my funeral. When I die, I just want them to plant me somewhere warm. And then when the pretty women walk over my grave I would grab their ankles, like in that movie.

Neil Gaiman

That's the way things come clear. All of a sudden. And then you realize how obvious they've been all along.

Madeleine L'Engle

High-performing people set goals religiously and track them religiously. They obsess about whether they're hitting or missing those goals, and why. If you don't set and track goals, life just passes you by.

Cameron Herold

It happened in Miami, in Coral Gables, a great big ol' Cuban wedding. It was pretty intense.

Jon Secada

What is true by lamplight is not always true by sunlight.

Joseph Joubert

Fashion is like the ashes left behind by the uniquely shaped flames of the fire, the trace alone revealing that a fire actually took place.

Paul De Man

What a kid I got, I told him about the birds and the bee and he told me about the butcher and my wife.

Rodney Dangerfield

If it isn't a success, that still wouldn't be grounds for divorce. On her film The Long Kiss Goodnight produced by husband Renny Harlin

Geena Davis

That which is so universal as death must be a benefit.

Friedrich von Schiller

It's amazing how fast generations lose sight of other generations. One of the first things the young composers who come to work with me say is that they want to write music people will like, instead of gaining their credentials by being rejected by the audience.

Carlisle Floyd

If conquerors be regarded as the engine-drivers of History, then the conquerors of thought are perhaps the pointsmen who, less conspicuous to the traveler's eye, determine the direction of the journey.

Arthur Koestler