So much of what we do as artists is a combination of personal experience and imagination, and how that all creeps into your work is not so linear.

I'm still learning, you know. At 80, I feel there is a lot I don't know.

Lena Horne

If there be light, then there is darkness; if cold, heat; if height, depth; if solid, fluid; if hard, soft; if rough, smooth; if calm, tempest; if prosperity, adversity; if life, death.

Pythagoras

If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?

Alexandr Solzhenitsyn, Gulag Arc

My dad was a workaholic. I saw him work seven days a week.

Kay Bailey Hutchison

When I run in the morning, my body spends the first 20 minutes trying to figure out what's happening to it.

Danny Pudi

Nothing more detestable does the earth produce than an ungrateful man.

Decimus Magnus Ausonius

If we ever forget that we are One Nation Under God, then we will be a nation gone under.

Ronald Reagan

The guillotine is the ultimate expression of Law, and its name is vengeance; it is not neutral, nor does it allow us to remain neutral. All social questions achieve their finality around that blade. The scaffold is an image. It is not merely a framework, a machine, a lifeless mechanism of wood, iron, and rope. It is as though it were a being having its own dark purpose, as though the framework saw, the machine listened, and the mechanism understood; as though that arrangement of wood and iron and rope expressed a will. In the hideous picture which its presence evokes it seems to be most terribly a part of what it does. It is the executioner's accomplice; it consumes, devouring flesh and drinking blood. It is a kind of monster created by the judge and the craftsman; a spectre seeming to live an awful life born of the death it deals.

Victor Hugo

I am so convinced of the advantages of looking at mankind instead of reading about them, and of the bitter effects of staying at home with all the narrow prejudices of an Islander, that I think there should be a law amongst us to set our young men abroad for a term among the few allies our wars have left us.

Lord (George Gordon) Byron

I never saw my dad cry. My son saw me cry. My dad never told me he loved me, and consequently I told Scott I loved him every other minute. The point is, I'll make less mistakes than my dad, my sons hopefully will make less mistakes than me, and their sons will make less mistakes than their dads.

James Caan

Fame is like a shaved pig with a greased tail, and it is only after it has slipped through the hands of some thousands, that some fellow, by mere chance, holds on to it!

Davy Crockett

The man who fears no truth has nothing to fear from lies.

Thomas Jefferson