On one occasion, I took him [Harry Houdini] to a magicians' meeting in my car, which that season was a Ford Model T coupe with a front seat of only two-person width and with the doorcatches inconveniently placed behind a person's elbow. When he tried to twist around and work the catch, Houdini found it stuck and in all seriousness, he demanded, "Say -- how do you get out of this thing?" It wasn't until I had reached across and pulled the knob for him that he began laughing, because he, of all people, couldn't get out of a Ford coupe.
In Houdini on Magic
When, shortly after taking office as president, George W. Bush was asked what he would do about global warming, his answer was, "We will not do anything that harms our economy, because first things first are the people who live in America." Asked whether the president would call on drivers to sharply reduce their fuel consumption, the White House press secretary, Ari Fleischer, replied, "That's a big no. The President believes that it's an American way of life, and that it should be the goal of policymakers to protect the American way of life. The American way of life is a blessed one."
The President of Good and Evil
The US presidency is a Tudor monarchy plus telephones.
In Writers at Work, ed. George Plimpton
... during those last weeks we received a shocking call from an American staffer, whose name I have long forgotten. He was engaged in some sort of planning exercise and wanted to know how many Rwandans had died, how many were refugees, and how many were internally displaced. He told me that his estimates indicated that it would take the deaths of 85,000 Rwandans to justify risking the life of one American soldier. It was macabre, to say the least.
Shake Hands With The Devil
"There is today too much pleading of sincerity," Brigge said. "Let me have men who are doubtful, who struggle with their consciences, who sometimes are confused by right and wrong, whose perceptions fail, whose troubled minds lead them this way and that and even to dark places they should not go. I do not care for these certain men who insist that what they feel is the truth as though their sincerity alone were enough to excuse their fanatic hearts. Doliffe's virtues bring suffering and agony in their wake. His sincerity is neither here nor there."
Havoc in Its Third Year
As democracy is perfected, the office represents, more and more closely, the inner soul of the people. We move toward a lofty ideal. On some great and glorious day the plain folks of the land will reach their heart's desire at last, and the White House will be adorned by a downright moron.
The Evening Sun
Ten years later, as a postdoctoral researcher at Oxford in 1976, I experienced a minor epiphany about ambition's degradation. At age 16 or 17, I had wanted to be another Einstein; at 21, I would have been happy to be another Feynman; at 24, a future T.D. Lee would have sufficed. By 1976, sharing an office with other postdoctoral researchers at Oxford, I realized that I had reached the point where I merely envied the postdoc in the office next door because he had been invited to give a seminar in France. In much the same way, by a process options theorists call time decay, financial stock options lose their potential as they approach their own expiration.
My Life as a Quant
I come from a people who gave the ten commandments to the world. Time has come to strengthen them by three additional ones, which we ought to adopt and commit ourselves to: thou shalt not be a perpetrator; thou shalt not be a victim; and thou shalt never, but never, be a bystander.
The undercurrent of raw sexuality in my movies is not a theme -- it's just an approach. For me, the human body is the first fact of human existence. I'm an atheist. I don't believe in an afterlife. To me, our bodily reality is often avoided -- a lot of art, religion, politics, and culture seek to make us avoid our existential reality. And I insist on it. ... I'm not looking to transcend the body, but to delve into it. Profoundly.
In a Globe & Mail interview
If the Trail of Tears is a glacier that inched its way west, my uncle is one of the boulders it deposited when it stopped. He had to work the farm, and the farm he worked was what was left of his grandfather's Indian allotment. And then came the Dust Bowl, and then came the war. All these historical forces bore down on him, but he did not break. Still, compared to him, compared to the people we descend from, I am free of history. I'm so free of history I have to get in a car and drive seven states to find it.
"What I See When I Look at the Face on the $20 Bill", in Take the Cannoli
My personal experience has not been that traveling around the country is broadening or relaxing, or that radical changes in place and context have a salutary effect, but rather that intranational tourism is radically constricting and humbling in the hardest way -- hostile to my fantasy of being a true individual, of living somehow outside and above it all. (Coming up is the part that my companions find especially unhappy and repellent, a sure way to spoil the fun of vacation travel.) To be a mass tourist, for me, is to become a pure late-date American: alien, ignorant, greedy for something you cannot ever have, disappointed in a way you can never admit. It is to spoil, by way of sheer ontology, the very unspoiledness you are there to experience. It is to impose yourself on places that in all noneconomic ways would be better, realer, without you. It is, in lines and gridlock and transaction after transaction, to confront a dimension of yourself that is as inescapable as it is painful: as a tourist, you become economically significant but existentially loathsome, an insect on a dead thing.
"Consider the Lobster", in The Best American Essays 2005
In his review of "Breaking the Spell," Leon Wieseltier couldn't resist the reflexive accusation that building a worldview on a scientific base is reductive, and as is often the case, he trotted out the existence of art to capture our sympathies. As a composer, I am weary of being commandeered as evidence of supernatural forces. Unlike Wieseltier, I do not find it difficult to "envisage the biological utilities" of the "Missa Solemnis"; it merely requires a chain with more than one link.
In a letter to the New York Times
I have found that if I am turned loose in a large library, after hesitating over covers for half an hour or so, it is usually a book of soldier memoirs which I take down. Man is never so interesting as when he is thoroughly in earnest, and no one is so earnest as he whose life is at stake upon the event.
Through The Magic Door
He's the Pope. ... One must recall that this isn't just some random man in high drag who hears voices and really wants to operate vaginas on a part-time basis despite professional obligations not to.
In a discussion on Pharyngula
Our technological civilization will not last on this planet. Our existence is, clearly, not sustainable. We're going to be the next ones to become extinct. And that's okay. Let's enjoy each other while we can; make friends; go to the movies.
In an interview during Ebertfest 2007
I left the flat depressed but, as I walked down Espedair Street, back into town under a glorious sunset of red and gold, slowly a feeling of contentment, intensifying almost to elation, filled me. I couldn't say why; it felt like more than having gone through a period of mourning and come out the other side, and more than just having reassessed my own woes and decided they were slight compared to what some people had to bear; it felt like faith, like revelation: that things went on, that life ground on regardless, and mindless, and produced pain and pleasure and hope and fear and joy and despair, and you dodged some of it and you sought some of it and sometimes you were lucky and sometimes you weren't, and sometimes you could plan your way ahead and that would be the right thing to have done, but other times all you could do was forget about plans and just be ready to react, and sometimes the obvious was true and sometimes it wasn't, and sometimes experience helped but not always, and it was all luck, fate, in the end; you lived, and you waited to see what happened, and you would rarely ever be sure that what you had done was really the right thing or the wrong thing, because things can always be better, and things can always be worse.
Espedair Street
His love of each particular experiment, and his eager zeal not to lose the fruit of it, came out markedly in these crossimng experiments -- in the elaborate care he took not to make any confusion in putting capsules into wrong trays, &c, &c. I can recall his appearance as he counted seeds under the simple microscope with an alterness not usually characterising such mechanical work as counting. I think he personified each seed as a small demon trying to elude him by getting into the wrong heap, or jumping away altogether, and this gave to the work the excitement of a game.
Writing about his father Charles, who was performing experiments on plant pollination. Quoted in Charles Darwin: The Power of Place (2002), Janet Browne.