"We didn't know each other [with Larry Kramer at Yale], but we had a lot of mutual friends."

“In the long run, failure was the only thing that worked predictably. All else was accidental.”

Source : Joseph Heller (1997). “Good as Gold”, p.71, Simon and Schuster

“My father was a guy who, because of the businesses he was in - the hotel business, the hospitality business - he didn't differentiate between the waiter serving you dinner, from the maitre d from the guy who owns a restaurant. Everybody was the same to him. He didn't look at who you were. He didn't look at your wallet.”

Source : "Super Bowl Q&A with … Steve Tisch". Interview with Steve Serby, nypost.com. February 5, 2012.

“It's not only progressives who listen to progressive radio.”

“I think a lot of the reason people are attracted to the Keystone pipeline is because at least we're doing something. There's a fear that society will collapse if it's not acting. To contrast those actions with other actions is important in making it feel plausible. Maybe we must have the size of the dream meet the size of the threat.”

“The asymmetry of time, the arrow that points from past to future, plays an unmistakable role in our everyday lives: it accounts for why we cannot turn an omelet into an egg, why ice cubes never spontaneously unmelt in a glass of water, and why we remember the past but not the future. And the origin of the asymmetry we experience can be traced all the way back to the orderliness of the universe near the big bang. Every time you break an egg, you are doing observational cosmology.”

“Jesus, what made You so small? LOVE!”

“Without thinking too much about it in specific terms, I was showing the America I knew and observed to others who might not have noticed. My fundamental purpose is to interpret the typical American. I am a story teller.”

“In order to govern, the question is not to follow out a more or less valid theory but to build with whatever materials are at hand. The inevitable must be accepted and turned to advantage.”