Most of us have a soundtrack running in the background of our lives. I access that soundtrack when I write.

Beauty without wit offers nothing but the enjoyment of its material charms, whilst witty ugliness captivates by the charms of the mind, and at last fulfils all the desires of the man it has captivated.

Giacomo Casanova

A great book should leave you with many experiences and slightly exhausted at the end. You should live several lives while reading it.

William Styron

Various experts, here and abroad, believe that the immediate postwar inflationary climate has now been converted into an epoch of price stability. One hopes this cheerful diagnosis is correct. However, a careful survey of the behavior of prices and costs shows that our recent stability in the wholesale price index has come in a period of admittedly high unemployment and slackness in our economy. For this reason it is premature to believe that the restoration of high employment will no longer involve problems concerning the stability of prices.Economists are not yet agreed how serious this new malady of inflation really is. Many feel that new institutional programs, other than conventional fiscal and monetary policies, must be devised to meet this new challenge. But whatever the merits of the varying views on this subject, it should be made manifest that the goal of high employment and effective real growth cannot be abandoned because of the problematical fear that re-attaining prosperity in America may bring with it some difficulties; if recovery means a reopening of the cost-push problem, then we have no choice but to move closer to the day when that problem has to be successfully grappled with.

Paul A. Samuelson, from a report

People who make music together cannot be enemies, at least while the music lasts.

Paul Hindemith

No matter how happily a woman may be married, it always pleases her to discover that there is a nice man who wishes that she were not.

H. L. Mencken

He that will believe only what he can fully comprehend must have a long head or a very short creed.

Charles Caleb Colton

Give me six hours to chop down a tree and I will spend the first four sharpening the axe.

Abraham Lincoln

Science knows only one commandment -- contribute to science.

Bertolt Brecht

Impossible situations can become possible miracles.

Robert H. Schuller

I want to go out at the top, but the secret is knowing when you're at the top, it's so difficult in this business, your career fluctuates all the time, up and down, like a pair of trousers.

Rod Stewart

I truly believe that we have infinite levels of power that we don't even know are available to us.

Michael J. Fox

Discovery is always rape of the natural world. Always.

Michael Crichton