I speak the truth not so much as I would, but as much as I dare, and I dare a little more as I grow older.

Good dreams don't come cheap, you've got to pay for them and If you just dream when you're asleep this is no way for them to come alive... to survive.

Harry Chapin

All good books are alike in that they are truer than if they really happened and after you are finished reading one you feel that it all happened to you and after which it all belongs to you.

Ernest Hemingway

I have had dreams, and I have had nightmares. I overcame the nightmares because of my dreams.

Jonas Salk

When Ronald Reagan's career in show business came to an end, he was hired to impersonate, first, a California governor and then an American president who would reduce taxes for his employers, the Southern and Western New Rich, much of whose money came from the defence industries. There is nothing unusual about this arrangement. All recent presidents have had their price-tags.

Gore Vidal, Armageddon? (essay),

We should be careful to get out of an experience only the wisdom that is in it -- and stop there; lest we be like the cat that sits down on a hot stove-lid. She will never sit down on a hot stove-lid again -- and that is well; but also she will never sit down on a cold one anymore.

Mark Twain

Never criticize a man until you've walked a mile in his moccasins.

American Indian Proverb

Habit is habit, and not to be flung out of the window by any man, but coaxed downstairs a step at a time.

Mark Twain, The Tragedy of Pudd'

I can get whatever I want to eat and when you, you know, you forget to eat you sometimes pick up fast food.

Star Jones

Suffering is the positive element in this world, indeed it is the only link between this world and the positive.

Franz Kafka

I like food, like any other guy, but it is not the main thing in my life. I can do without it.

Lee Child

It doesn't happen to me anymore, because a fresh generation of Africans and Asians has arisen to take over the business, but in my early years in Washington, D.C., I would often find myself in the back of a big beat-up old cab driven by an African-American veteran. I became used to the formalities of the : on some hot and drowsy Dixie-like afternoon I would flag down a flaking Chevy. Behind the wheel, leaning wa-aay back and relaxed, often with a cigar stub in the corner of his mouth (and, I am not making this up, but sometimes also with a genuine porkpie hat on the back of his head) would be a grizzled man with the waist of his pants somewhere up around his armpits. I would state my desired destination. In accordance with ancient cabdriver custom, he would say nothing inresponse but simply engage the stickshift on his steering wheel and begin to cruise in a leisurely fashion. There would be a pause. Then: 'You from England?' I would always try to say something along the lines of 'Well, I'm in no position to deny it.' This occasionally got me a grin; in any case, I always knew what was coming next. 'I was there once.' 'Were you in the service?' 'I sure was.' 'Did you get to Normandy?' 'Yes, sir.' But it wasn't Normandy or combat about which they wanted to reminisce. (With real combat veterans, by the way, it almost never is.) It was England itself. 'Man did it know how to rain and the warm beer. Nice people, though. Real nice.' I would never forget to say, as I got out and deliberately didn't overtip (that seeming a cheap thing to do), how much this effort on their part was remembered and appreciated.

Christopher Hitchens

Fortune is a great deceiver. She sells very dear the things she seems to give us.

Vincent Voiture