"Alas, I have done nothing this day! What?! Have you not lived? It is not only the fundamental but the noblest of your occupations."

“I have never considered myself a poet. I have no interest in poetic artistry.”

“The most powerful factors in the world are clear ideas in the minds of energetic men of good will.”

“I am still learning - how to take joy in all the people I am, how to use all my selves in the service of what I believe, how to accept when I fail and rejoice when I succeed.”

“It's not what happens to you that determines how far you will go in life; it is how you handle what happens to you.”

“Every mother can easily imagine losing a child. Motherhood is always half loss anyway. The three-year-old is lost at five, the five-year-old at nine. We consort with ghosts, even as we sit and eat with, scold and kiss, their current corporeal forms. We speak to people who have vanished and, when they answer us, they do the same. Naturally, the information in these speeches is garbled in the translation.”

“One of the biggest challenges in my job is letting go of the movie once you go home at night, and knowing you can't do anything to your performance once you've laid it on film.”

Source : "How to Survive a Scandal". Interview with Michael Mechanic, www.motherjones.com. October 10, 2014.

“Idealistic reformers are dangerous because their idealism has no roots in love, but is simply a hysterical and unbalanced rage for order amidst their own chaos.”

Source : William Irwin Thompson (1977). “Evil and world order”

“I have laughed, in bitterness and agony of heart, at the contrast between what I seem and what I am!”