We must never confuse elegance with snobbery.

Unless I am both capable of and willing to reopen the wound every time I write a song, if I choose to not look inside myself to write music, I'm really not worth being called an artist at all.

Lady Gaga

To have done anything just for money is to have been truly idle.

Henry David Thoreau

I think the greatest taboos in America are faith and failure.

Michael Malone

Man is a useless passion.

JeanPaul Sartre

The essence of a man is found in his faults.

Francis Picabia

My mother had morning sickness after I was born.

Rodney Dangerfield

But memory is like plaster: peel it back and you just might find a completely different picture.

Jodi Picoult

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.

Roger Ebert

Usually a family is led through the mom or the dad and their career and for the family to be led by my career, even though God has led it, could be a lot of pressure.

Stacie Orrico

Along the road of life are many pleasure resorts, but think not that by tarrying in them you will take more days to the journey. The day of your arrival is already recorded.

Ambrose Bierce

We do not celebrate the death of our enemies.

Yitzhak Rabin

Heroism is not only in the man, but in the occasion.

Calvin Coolidge