This may sound funny, but as much as the 'Today' show matured me, it also was something of a cocoon. I'd been happy there. I never went into the boss's office and pounded my fist on the desk, saying, 'Give me more money! Give me a prime-time show!'

Realism, whether it be socialist or not, falls short of reality. It shrinks it, attenuates it, falsifies it; it does not take into account our basic truths and our fundamental obsessions: love, death, astonishment. It presents man in a reduced and estranged perspective. Truth is in our dreams, in the imagination.

Eugene Ionesco

There are some people who become best friends with everyone they photograph. There are people that I really like and admire and respect, but in a way I think it's better to keep a distance. I think you get better pictures of people that you don't know very well.

Mary Ellen Mark

What I really want to tell him is to pick up that baby of his and hold her tight, to set the moon on the edge of her crib and to hang her name up in the stars.

Jodi Picoult

Our intellect is not the most subtle, the most powerful, the most appropriate, instrument for revealing the truth. It is life that, little by little, example by example, permits us to see that what is most important to our heart, or to our mind, is learned not by reasoning but through other agencies. Then it is that the intellect, observing their superiority, abdicates its control to them upon reasoned grounds and agrees to become their collaborator and lackey.

Marcel Proust

I never wanted to be famous.

Dave Attell

A lot of knowledge in any kind of an organization is what we call task knowledge. These are things that people who have been there a long time understand are important, but they may not know how to talk about them. It's often called the culture of the organization.

Howard Gardner

My dad was Jewish. My mom is not. So I was not raised anything.

Matt Lauer

There are two theories on hitting the knuckleball. Unfortunately, neither of them works.

Charley Lau

The Oscars demonstrate the will of the people to control and judge those they have elected to stand above them (much, perhaps, as in bygone days, an election celebrated the same).

David Mamet

The most original of authors are not so because they advance what is new, but more because they know how to say something, as if it had never been said before.

Johann von Goethe

Jealousy is not at all low, but it catches us humbled and bowed down, at first sight.

Sidonie Gabrielle Colette

Books, like proverbs, receive their chief value from the stamp and esteem of the ages through which they have passed

Sir William Temple