For someone who's had the level of success I've had, there's been very little critical review of my work, which is pretty fascinating.

Religion was used as an ideology, as a system of control. When they forced the veil upon women, they were using it as an instrument of control in the same way that in Mao's China people were wearing Mao jackets and women were not supposed to wear any makeup.

Azar Nafisi

A character is like an acrostic or Alexandrian stanza; read it forward, backward, or across, it still spells the same thing.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

I have spent more than half a lifetime trying to express the tragic moment.

Marcel Marceau

Youth does not require reasons for living, it only needs pretexts.

Jos

The tyrant grinds down his slaves and they don't turn against him, they crush those beneath them.

Emily Bronte

I think that a song, when it works, never mind a piece of long form music, even a song is something that speaks to itself but has a language all of its own, ideally.

Steve Hackett

The more relaxed you are, the better you are at everything--the better you are with your loved ones, the better you are with enemies, the better you are at your job, the better you are with yourself.

Bill Murray

The art of the critic in a nutshell: to coin slogans without betraying ideas. The slogans of an inadequate criticism peddle ideas to fashion.

Walter Benjamin

Iron rusts from disuse, stagnant water loses its purity and in cold weather becomes frozen; even so does inaction sap the vigors of the mind.

Leonardo DaVinci

Man is descended from a hairy, tailed quadruped, probably arboreal in its habits.

Charles Darwin

I can't write without a reader. It's precisely like a kiss - you can't do it alone.

John Cheever

To understand the world one must not be worrying about one's self.

Albert Einstein