There were a few years there when I was just so enamored with the idea of living some sort of famous person's lifestyle that really isn't suited to me.

As much as I like it when a book I'm writing speeds along, the downside can be that an author becomes too eager to finish and rushes the end. The end is even more important than the first page, and rushing can damage it.

David Morrell

For me, the cinema is not a slice of life, but a piece of cake.

Alfred Hitchcock

Disappointment is a sort of bankruptcy - the bankruptcy of a soul that expends too much in hope and expectation.

Eric Hoffer

One of the questions asked by al-Balkhi, and often repeated to this day, is this: Why do the children of Israel continue to suffer? My grandmother Dodo thought it was because the were jealous. The seder for Passover (which is a shame-faced simulacrum of a Hellenic question-and-answer session, even including the wine) tells the children that it's one of those things that happens to every Jewish generation. After the or or Holocaust, many rabbis tried to tell the survivors that the immolation had been a punishment for 'exile,' or for insufficient attention to the Covenant. This explanation was something of a flop with those whose parents or children had been the raw material for the 'proof,' so for a time the professional interpreters of god's will went decently quiet. This interval of ambivalence lasted until the war of 1967, when it was announced that the divine purpose could be discerned after all. How wrong, how foolish, to have announced its discovery prematurely! The exile and the Shoah could now both be understood, as part of a heavenly if somewhat roundabout scheme to recover the Western Wall in Jerusalem and other pieces of biblically mandated real estate.I regard it as a matter of self-respect to spit in public on rationalizations of this kind. (They are almost as repellent, in their combination of arrogance, masochism, and affected false modesty, as Edith Stein's 'offer' of her life to expiate the regrettable unbelief in Jesus of her former fellow Jews.) The sage Jews are those who have put religion behind them and become in so many societies the leaven of the secular and the atheist.

Christopher Hitchens

The burning of rebellious thoughts in the little breast, of internal hatred and opposition, could not long go on without slight whiffs of external smoke, such as mark the course of subterranean fire.

Harriet Beecher Stowe

A learning experience is one of those things that says, 'You know that thing you just did? Don't do that.

Douglas Adams

The first requisite of a good citizen in this republic of ours is that he shall be able and willing to pull his own weight.

Theodore Roosevelt

I am struggling to maintain the government, not to overthrow it. I am struggling especially to prevent others from overthrowing it.

Abraham Lincoln

If a man were permitted to make all the ballads, he need not care who should make the laws of a nation.

Andrew Fletcher, Conversation Co

Driving race cars was an avenue for me to learn how to build my own car, and that was my ambition all along.

Caroll Shelby

Do not worry about whether or not the sun will rise. Be prepared to enjoy it.

Source Unknown

History will have to record that the greatest tragedy of this period of social transition was not the strident clamor of the bad people, but the appalling silence of the good people.

Martin Luther King, Jr.