"I don't do all that well in the writerly world. I'm happier being outside the flow."

“To many Congressmen and Senators right now, there's a ceaseless antagonism toward Hollywood because politically, it is high-reward and low-risk. So when you can't do anything about poverty or the budget deficit, and you can't deal with Bosnia or the possibility of nuclear explosions in Russia, what do you do? You bash Hollywood and get on the front pages.”

Source : "Public Endorses Uplifting Movies, Dole Tells Hollywood" by Adam Nagourney, www.nytimes.com. July 31, 1996.

“If you are very lucky, you're allowed to be in certain places during just the right season of your life: by the sea for the summer when you're seven or eight and full of the absolute need to swim until dark and exhaustion close their hands together, cupping you in between.”

“Knowing what you know, be serene also, like a mountain; and do not be distressed by misfortune. Knowledge without serenity is an unlit candle; together they are honey-comb; honey without wax is a noble thing; wax without honey is only fit for burning.”

“One of the things that has been very difficult in Libya is the sense of uncertainty - the sense that they haven't actually finished the revolution, that there was still a great deal of uncertainty. That uncertainty has made Libya harder for business in terms of oil and other things as well.”

Source : "Interview: Symantec's John Thompson talks about big picture security". Interview with Ed Scannell, www.infoworld.com. June 16, 2004.

“In our imaginations the adults of our childhood remain extreme, essential - we might say radical since they are the roots that fed luxuriant later systems. Those first bohemians, for instance, stay operatic in memory even though were we to meet them today - well, what would we think, we who've elaborated our eccentricities with a patience, a professionalism they never knew?”

“Social change rarely comes about through the efforts of the disenfranchised. The middle class creates social revolutions.”

“It's not the struggle that makes us artists, but Art that makes us struggle.”

“Self-consciousness is the curse of the city and all that sophistication implies.”