When you are listening to music it is better to cover your eyes than your ears.
Edith Wharton was a natural story-teller. As plots do in real life, hers flow directly from character. Her prose is so effortlessly elegant that you're rarely aware as they purl by that the sentences are so pretty. More concerned with what is put than how it is put, she also understood that you only say anything at all when you say it well.
Actually, the Kentucky moment was better than winning the two National Championships, because it was the epitome of what I try to get from a team in a crisis situation.
There's always going to be someone with a bigger toy than yours.
No student of history can fail to see the moral interest of the Middle Ages, any more than an artist can fail to see their aesthetic interest.
I've always believed that if you had a fellow who works 150 percent of the time, he's going to beat a fellow who works something less than that.
On the contrary. Internationalism also recognizes, by its very name, that nations do exist. It simply limits their scope more than one-sided nationalism does.
Sally Gardner must drive her publishers to distraction: no sooner have they worked out how to market one brilliant book than she delivers another that is just as brilliant but totally different.
Freedom of choice is more to be treasured than any possession earth can give.
The fun part about doing our movies is that you're creating something using the talents of people rather than finding these pathetic people who are thrust into these situations. That, to me, is completely artless.
Never bring the problem solving stage into the decision making stage. Otherwise, you surrender yourself to the problem rather than the solution.
The essential elements of giving are power and love - activity and affection - and the consciousness of the race testifies that in the high and appropriate exercise of these is a blessedness greater than any other.
There are people who tell you to shut up because you're just a celebrity, but pundits, talking heads, they're every bit the celebrity and a lot of them aren't any more qualified than the average man on the street.
I think if you're in this business, like any high-stakes business, the highs and lows can make you a manic-depressive person, if you weren't that way to start with. 'Cause it's just so crazy on your psyche. A lot of it has to do with people thinking they're greater than someone else.
The tragedy is that there is so much more incentive - money - to destroy the ecology than there is to preserve it.
Millionaires are risk-takers, and they don't become millionaires until they're 40 or 50. It's a slower process than a lot of people think.
For this reason, strangers are not really conceived as individuals, but as strangers of a particular type: the element of distance is no less general in regard to them than the element of nearness.
Confidence contributes more to conversation than wit.
It is often easier to become outraged by injustice half a world away than by oppression and discrimination half a block from home.
I really think we should pass a law in every state, I don't care whether it takes the independence away from an old person or not. You shouldn't be driving a car if you're over the age of 80. Maybe even less than that.
As a child, I could bike down the hill from my house and grab an ice-cold bottle of soda from the neighborhood grocer, which was nothing more than a corrugated metal shack run by two Indian men clad in sarongs.
My feelings about my mortality are less selfish than they used to be. I used to affect a cavalier attitude to death; now I see it from my son's perspective.
It is not advantageous for Russia in its present state to fight against Chechnya. The army is a mess. It must be made combat ready. That will take time. Russia has a lot of economic, social and political problems much more important than Chechnya.
It is far more important to be able to hit the target than it is to haggle over who makes a weapon or who pulls a trigger.
Even though mother's issues are not front page news, they touch us all personally, some more than others, and I believe passionately in the power of grassroots engagement.
I spent three days a week for 10 years educating myself in the public library, and it's better than college. People should educate themselves - you can get a complete education for no money. At the end of 10 years, I had read every book in the library and I'd written a thousand stories.
I love home. I'd rather be at home than anywhere else.
In a way, no one's harder on the poor than the poor themselves.
My friends, love is better than anger. Hope is better than fear. Optimism is better than despair. So let us be loving, hopeful and optimistic. And we'll change the world.
People who have a sense of self-efficacy bounce back from failure; they approach things in terms of how to handle them rather than worrying about what can go wrong.
I want to make it faster than anyone has ever made it before. I'd like to be a legend by the time I'm 25.
Second-generation Hispanics marry non-Hispanics at a higher rate than second-generation Irish or Italians. Second-generation Hispanics' English language capability rates are higher than previous immigrant groups'.
The word 'insurgency' had connotations that really sent a shiver down the spine of folks in Washington, in the United States - for good reason, because it means this is something much bigger than just a few terrorist cells.
I am harder on myself than anyone else could be.
I think that literature is something that embraces a much larger experience than politics. It's an expression of what is life, of what are all the dimensions of life. But politics is one among others.
One of the lessons learned during the Vietnam War was that the depiction of wounded soldiers, of coffins stacked higher than their living guards, had a negative effect on the viewing public. The military in Iraq specifically banned the photographing of wounded soldiers and coffins, thus sanitizing this terrible and bloody conflict.
