Teaching writing over the years intrudes on your own writing in important ways, taking away some of the excitement of poetry.

Some fans get genuinely upset if I admit that a song that they held close to their heart was not based on actual events in my life. Like What Sarah Said : I was never in a waiting room in a hospital waiting for news that somebody was going to die.

Ben Gibbard

Film-makers are always going to be interested in making movies that plug into society around them. That's what a vibrant, artistically alert community should be doing. After all, it would be sad if we only made films about alien robots.

Mark Boal

One of the things about equality is not just that you be treated equally to a man, but that you treat yourself equally to the way you treat a man.

Marlo Thomas

You're both so screwed up alone that together you're like the perfect mess.

J. Sterling

They sin who tell us Love can die: with Life all other passions fly, all others are but vanity.

Robert Southey

And I loved Fats Waller. I love his instrumental abilities, his vocal abilities and his sense of humor.

Paul McCartney

I regard anti-Semitism as ineradicable and as one element of the toxin with which religion has infected us. Perhaps partly for this reason, I have never been able to see Zionism as a cure for it. American and British and French Jews have told me with perfect sincerity that they are always prepared for the day when 'it happens again' and the Jew-baiters take over. (And I don't pretend not to know what they are talking about: I have actually seen the rabid phenomenon at work in modern and sunny Argentina and am unable to forget it.) So then, they seem to think, they will take refuge in the Law of Return, and in Haifa, or for all I know in Hebron. Never mind for now that if all of world Jewry settle in Palestine, this would actually necessitate further Israeli expansion, expulsion, and colonization, and that their departure under these apocalyptic conditions would leave the new brownshirts and blackshirts in possession of the French and British and American nuclear arsenals. This is ghetto thinking, hardly even fractionally updated to take into account what has changed. The important but delayed realization will have to come: Israeli Jews are the diaspora, not a group that has escaped from it. Why else does Israel daily beseech the often-flourishing Jews of other lands, urging them to help the most endangered Jews of all: the ones who rule Palestine by force of arms? Why else, having supposedly escaped from the need to rely on Gentile goodwill, has Israel come to depend more and more upon it? On this reckoning, Zionism must constitute one of the greatest potential non sequiturs in human history.

Christopher Hitchens

You are born modern, you do not become so.

Jean Baudrillard

What you do speaks so loudly that I cannot hear what you say.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

I do two things. I design mobile computers and I study brains.

Jeff Hawkins

No sooner met but they looked; no sooner looked but they loved; no sooner loved but they sighed; no sooner sighed but they asked one another the reason; no sooner knew the reason but they sought the remedy; and in these degrees have they made a pair of stairs to marriage, which they will climb incontinent, or else be incontinent before marriage.

William Shakespeare

The man who throws a bomb is an artist, because he prefers a great moment to everything.

Gilbert K. Chesterton