We rightly scorn those who have no made use of their defects, who have not exploited their deficiencies, and have not been enriched by their losses, as we despise any man who does not suffer at being a man or simply at being. Hence no graver insult can be inflicted than to call someone 'happy', no greater flattery than to grant him a 'vein of melancholy'... This is because gaiety is link to no important action and because, except for the mad, no one laughs when he is alone.

My father was brought up in an orphanage in the Catskills. He was a factory worker. And because his family wasn't there for him, family was everything. We could disagree inside the house, but outside the house it was us against the world. So when I became a drag actor, he looked sideways but said okay.

Harvey Fierstein

had been equally obvious. The new aristocracy was made up for the most part of bureaucrats, scientists, technicians, trade-union organisers, publicity experts, sociologists, teachers, journalists and professional politicians. These people, whose origins

George Orwell

I'd definitely rather be rich than famous.

Radha Mitchell

Who among us has not, in moments of ambition, dreamt of the miracle of a form of poetic prose, musical but without rhythm and rhyme, both supple and staccato enough to adapt itself to the lyrical movements of our souls, the undulating movements of our reveries, and the convulsive movements of our consciences? This obsessive ideal springs above all from frequent contact with enormous cities, from the junction of their innumerable connections.

Charles Baudelaire

They had their cynical code worked out. The public are swine; advertising is the rattling of a stick inside a swill-bucket.

George Orwell

Postmodernism refuses to privilege any one perspective, and recognizes only difference, never inequality, only fragments, never conflict.

Elizabeth Wilson

Mmm. Cupcakes.

Kiersten White

I went to the school and put it to William, particularly, that if you find someone you love in life, you must hang onto it, and look after it, and if you were lucky enough to find someone who loved you, then you must protect it.

Princess Diana

All I have learned in life really just boils down to this: there is only one difference between the so-called wise and the so-called foolish...and between those who are truly happy and those who are not. Those who are wise - and those who are happy - embrace and appreciate life. Those who are unhappy and unwise do not. That is all; that is the only difference.

Rasheed Ogunlaru

If you love something let it go free. If it doesn't come back, you never had it. If it comes back, love it forever.

Doug Horton

My wallpaper and I are fighting a duel to the death. One or the other of us has to go.

Oscar Wilde

If you want to be a writer, you must do two things above all others: read a lot and write a lot. There's no way around these two things that I'm aware of, no shortcut.

Stephen King