“Everything, decided Francie after that first lecture, was vibrant with life and there was no death in chemistry. She was puzzled as to why learned people didn’t adopt chemistry as a religion.”

Brooklyn was a dream. All the things that happened there just couldn’t happen. It was all dream stuff. Or was it all real and true and was it that she, Francie, was the dreamer?

Look at everything always as though you were seeing it either for the first or last time: Thus is your time on earth filled with glory.

She liked the combined smell of worn leather bindings, library past and freshly inked stamping pads better than she liked the smell of burning incense at high mass.

I’ll have a desk like this in my parlor and white walls and a clean green blotter every Saturday night and a row of shining yellow pencils always sharpened for writing and a golden-brown bowl with a flower or some leaves or berries always in it and books . . . books . . . books. . . .

I tried my best to kill that man in the hallway. Then one sunny day, they walk out in all innocence and they walk right into the grief that you’d give your life to spare them from.

She must start out believing in things not of this world. Then when the world becomes too ugly for living in, the child can reach back and live in her imagination.

She told Papa about it. He made her stick out her tongue and he felt her wrist. He shook his head sadly and said, “You have a bad case, a very bad case.” “Of what?” “Growing up.

Dear God,’ she prayed, ‘let me be something every minute of every hour of my life.’

New York! I’ve always wanted to see it and now I’ve see it. It’s true what they say– it’s the most wonderful city in the world.

The world was hers for the reading.

I can never give a ‘yes’ or a ‘no.’ I don’t believe everything in life can be settled by a monosyllable.

From that moment on, the world was hers for the reading. She would never be lonely again.

I hate all those flirty-birty games that women make up. Life’s too short. If you ever find a man you love, don’t waste time hanging your head and simpering. Go right up to him and say, ‘I love you. How about getting married?

She had had the pain; it had been like being boiled alive in scalding oil and not being able to die to get free of it

But this tree in the yard-this tree that men chopped down…this tree that they built a bonfire around, trying to burn up it’s stump-this tree lived! It lived! And nothing could destroy it.

It was a good thing that she got herself into this other school. It showed her that there were other worlds beside the world she had been born into and that these other worlds were not unattainable.

I was going to do a book about the first prearranged Karpov-Kasparov match, ’84-’85. But the God-damn Jews have stolen my entire file on that.

My first ‘SNL’ episode was with Michael Phelps and Lil Wayne. And if you go back and watch the monologue.

Our first half is about how to make a living, and our second half has the promise of being about how to make a life.

A censure would put an indelible scar on the president’s place in history, .. Monica Lewinsky is not Watergate. Let he who has no sin in this chamber cast the first stone.

All artists are protected by copyright… and we should be the first to respect copyright.

You know, as you get older, the first thing you lose is memory. It seems to be happening with me.

Ask not first what the system does; ask what it does it to!

I started out as a very traditional actor. The first thing I ever did in terms of performance was singing.