"What I often forget about students, especially undergraduates, is that surface appearances are misleading. Most of them are at base as conventional as Presbyterian deacons."

“If a footballer presents himself as a family man and goes and has sex with a prostitute, should he gag her?”

“Men’s greatest weakness is their facade of strength, and women’s greatest strength is their facade of weakness.”

“There is no difference between an ISIS gunman and an American gunman that goes into a mosque, or the gunman Baruch Goldstein who went into the mosque in Bethlehem and killed 29 guys about fifteen years ago. Goldstein took his service weapon and tried to kill everybody in the mosque. He shot over a hundred people. There's no monopoly on terrorism. Terrorism experts know this and we live according to that.”

“When a man plays a woman in a dress, you're halfway there. It's inherently funny. When a woman plays a man, for whatever reason, it's not that instant kind of funny.”

“With the aid of a minute correction - that of the dispersing lens - in a gold frame perched on her nose, Miranda can see into hell.”

Source : Ingeborg Bachmann (1989). “Three Paths to the Lake: Stories”, Holmes & Meier Pub

“I found the blues too limiting, and classical was too disciplined.”

“You need to let yourself feel. Feel it, own it. Then move on”

“Writing takes a combination of sophistication and innocence; it takes conscience, our belief that something is beautiful because it is right.”