“I also found that for myself, since I’ve had no religious education, it was so interesting to see the different versions of heaven and what life on earth means.”

Life sometimes brings enormous difficulties and challenges that seem just too hard to bear. But bear them you can, and bear them you will, and your life can have a purpose.

To feel valued, to know, even if only once in a while, that you can do a job well is an absolutely marvelous feeling.

I can get a better grasp of what is going on in the world from one good Washington dinner party than from all the background information NBC piles on my desk.

Deep breaths are very helpful at shallow parties.

Wait for those unguarded moments. Relax the mood and, like the child dropping off to sleep, the subject often reveals his truest self.

I was the kind nobody thought could make it. I had a funny Boston accent. I couldn’t pronounce my R’s. I wasn’t a beauty.

Because there are so many shows on and because I’ve been so hands-on – I’ve had a piece on almost every single week – I don’t know how to cut back on that. You really can’t.

I find very often people like to confront rumors. It depends on how much they trust you. And you have to have a line between what is tasteful and what isn’t.

Show me someone who never gossips, and I’ll show you someone who isn’t interested in people.

If you were a tree, what kind would you be?

Success can make you go one of two ways. It can make you a prima donna – or it can smooth the edges, take away the insecurities, let the nice things come out.

A man cannot be comfortable [or cannot be made comfortable] without his own approval.

If it’s a woman, it’s caustic; if it’s a man, it’s authoritative.

I didn’t have a very religious family.

A great many people think that polysyllables are a sign of intelligence and refinement so they think they will impress others with their command of obscure words.

Before we had airplanes and astronauts, we really thought that there was an actual place beyond the clouds, somewhere over the rainbow. There was an actual place, and we could go above the clouds and find it.there.

The women I’m attracted to playing I hope will mean something to someone.

So peace does not mean just putting an end to violence or to war, but to all other factors that threaten peace, such as discrimination, such as inequality, poverty.

Beauty means this to one person, perhaps, and that to the other. And yet when any one of us has seen or heard or read that which to us is beautiful.

A poem compresses much in a small space and adds music, thus heightening its meaning.

Life’s scientific, but we don’t know, do we? Not certainly, I mean.

I don’t think they [contemporary writers] read me either. I mean, if we’re concerned genuinely with writing, I think we probably get on with our work.

No matter who you are, black, white, green, there’s going to be things in your way, you know what I mean?

You can’t allow the forces of political correction to shut you up. I mean, why are people afraid to say, ‘Merry Christmas?’ Give me a break. If people don’t like it, yeah, they can go do something else.