New York City is home to so many people from so many places and the uniqueness of it is that you never feel a foreigner. English is almost hardly ever heard in the subway. In fact, it's weird.

Writing is my obsession, my passion. My relationship with it is one of the most complex and agonizing and richly vexing that I have in my life.

Julianna Baggott

Normality is death.

Theodor Adorno

Prudence is but experience, which equal time, equally bestows on all men, in those things they equally apply themselves unto.

Thomas Hobbes

It is impossible to believe that the same God who permitted His own son to die a bachelor regards celibacy as an actual sin.

H. L. Mencken

The shrinkage in the flora is due to a combination of clean-farming, woodlot grazing, and good roads. Each of these necessary changes of course requires a larger reduction in the acreage available for wild plants, but none of them requires, or benefits by, the erasure of species from whole farms, townships, or counties. There are idle spots on every farm, and every highway is bordered by an idle strip as long as it is; keep cow, plow, and mower out of these idle spots, and the full native flora, plus dozens of interesting stowaways from foreign parts, could be part of the normal environment of every citizen.

Aldo Leopold, A Sand County Alma

Every country can be defined through their food, their music and their language. That's the soul of a country.

Quincy Jones

If a man wishes to truly not be written about, he would do well not to write letters to 18-year-old girls, inviting them into his life.

Joyce Maynard

The only perfection which modern civilisation achieves is mechanical; machines are magnificent and immaculate but the life which serves them or is served by them isn't magnificent or shiny or more perfect or more comely.

Karel Capek

In Genesis, it says that it is not good for a man to be alone; but sometimes it is a great relief.

John Barrymore

I therefore declare, that if you wish any remission of the taxation which falls upon the homes of the people of England and Wales, you can only find it by reducing the great military establishments, and diminishing the money paid to fighting men in time of peace.

Richard Cobden

The true way to gain much, is never to desire to gain too much.

Francis Beaumont

I've never believed that pop music is escapist trash. There's always a darkness in it, even amidst great pop music.

Thom Yorke