"A feminist is any woman who tells the truth about her life"

“I think dissonance in music makes you think. It isn't, 'Oh, that's a pretty melody I can whistle.' You have to sit down and listen to tell it apart from other things.”

“Madam, I have been looking for a person who disliked gravy all my life; let us swear eternal friendship.”

“I don't write on topics that require a lot of urgency. But in 'Stiff,' I wanted to change people's hearts about organ donation. Whenever I get a chance, I try to talk about that.”

“A little Isadora Duncan and a little Butoh this was choreography and performing that was simultaneously both lush and spare.”

“Some friends said they weren't surprised to find out Napoleon and I were related, but it came as quite a shock to me.”

Source : "DNA project reveals Tom Conti's Napoleonic blood and rich roots of Scotland's genetic legacy" by Robin McKie, www.theguardian.com. April 14, 2012.

“The beauties of conception are always superior to those of expression.”

“Curiously enough, it seems to be only in describing a mode of language which does not mean what it says that one can actually say what one means.”

“Socrates called himself a midwife of ideas. A great book is often such a midwife, delivering to full existence what has been coiled like an embryo in the dark, silent depths of the brain.”

Source : Clifton Fadiman (1988). “The lifetime reading plan”, HarperCollins Publishers