We now live in a world where the only thing to have is success, but failure is marvelous. It's fertiliser, it's like living fertiliser, because you're forced on yourself.

My hands tend to be full enough dealing with people who hate me for who I am. Concentrate too hard on the millions of people who hate you for what you are and you're likely to turn into one of those unkempt, sloppy dressers who sag beneath the weight of the two hundred political buttons they wear pinned to their coats and knapsacks.

David Sedaris

The mind is refrigerated by interruption; the thoughts are diverted from the principal subject; the reader is weary, he suspects not why; and at last throws away the book, which he has too diligently studied.

Samuel Johnson

If I imagine my soul, as I do when I pray, it's shaped like Stapafel. No change of place or religion can alter that. I lived beneath Stapafel from the hour I was born until I was sixteen. I've never seen it since, but that doesn't matter. My soul is in the likeness of a jagged peak with a rock like a man standing on its summit, and snags of rock shaped like trolls along its spine. Screes defend it, although it's not quite inaccessible if you know the way up.

Margaret Elphinstone

I met my grandfather just before he died, and it was the first time that I had seen Dad with a relative of his. It was interesting to see my own father as a son and the body language and alteration in attitude that comes with that, and it sort of changed our relationship for the better.

Christian Bale

Once I accomplish one thing and I'm satisfied, I try something else. I may be 50 and doing something totally outside of music and acting. Maybe I'll become a kindergarten teacher.

Kid Cudi

Medical research in the twentieth century mostly takes place in the lab in the Renaissance, though, researchers went first and foremost to the library to see what the ancients had said.

Peter Lewis Allen

It is frightfully difficult to know much about the fairies, and almost the only thing for certain is that there are fairies wherever there are children.

J.M. Barrie

We have forty million reasons for failure, but not a single excuse.

Rudyard Kipling

Women today are dealing with both their independence and also the fact that their lives are built around finding and satisfying the romantic models we grew up with.

Jane Campion

The fact that a person loves one particular person is what is important; the life lesson, whether you are homosexual or heterosexual, is that you not be promiscuous, and true to one person.

Loretta Devine

We got rid of a terrible dictator. We gave the Iraqi people an opportunity for a new life under a representative form of government.

Colin Powell

The new job of art is to sit on the wall and get more expensive.

Robert Hughes