“The hardest thing you will ever do is trust yourself.”

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.

A complex and intricate book full of elegant ideas and finely-drawn characters.

I think that we’re always drawn – particularly sophisticated people – are always drawn to the idea of simplicity.

and so judge of the part played by each of them during those old convulsive movements whereby her limbs were contorted and drawn up into their present posture.

They are drawn to spikes and pentagrams, gasoline, guitars screaming like whips, MIDI-programmed Thanatos, with sufficient amplitude to occupy that hollow space where consciousness once resided.

How often has not the parallel been drawn and the golden age of the Roman Empire, when the external brilliancy of life likewise dazzled the eye

It is easy to bend the young heart towards God, but the untrained heart of the old escapes the hold whenever it is so drawn.

Identifying pain in others was easy for me. I was drawn to it in some strange perverse way.

I have a passion for my work, and that can seep into you. It’s almost as if you’re drawn to it.