"It is not sufficient to have compassion only for those who are cute."

“I'm not a terribly social person, and so I have to really like people to work with them.”

“Adventure books are my personal favorites. 'The Endurance,' a story about Ernest Shackleton's legendary Antarctica expedition, or 'Into Thin Air,' Jon Krakauer's personal account of the 1996 disaster on Mt Everest, are two notables.”

“To abstain that we may enjoy is the epicurianism of reason.”

“I think it's the wrong way around to say when you get older move to the country. I think when you get older you move to New York. If you're a nice broad they'll look after you.”

“Only feeble minds are paralyzed by facts.”

“Beijing Coma took me 10 years to finish.”

Source : "The great Tiananmen taboo" by Ma Jian, www.theguardian.com. June 1, 2009.

“For me, the most exciting thing is to create good magic that's entertaining for an audience, and it would be lovely if a magician was fooled as well.”

Source : "Seven Lies About Lying". Interview with Errol Morris, opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com. August 5, 2009.

“Maybe that's what growing up means, in the end - you go far enough in the direction of - somewhere - and you realise that you've neutered the capacity of the term home to mean anything. [...] We don't get an endless number of orbits away from the place where meaning first arises, that treasure-house of first experiences. What we learn, instead, is that our adventures secure us in our isolation. Experience revokes our licence to return to simpler times. Sooner or later, there's no place remotely like home.”