Every accepted public quote

“I wanted to be a ballerina. I changed my mind.”

“In most schools, we measure children on what they know. By and large, they have to memorize the content of whatever test is coming up. Because measuring the results of rote learning is easy,...”

“I don't feel like a very feminine woman sometimes. I feel manly. When I was in my twenties I would say I was a masculine girl and now I realise the whole idea of femaleness is a construct. I...”

“Ambition. An overmastering desire to be vilified by enemies while living and made ridiculous by friends when dead.”

“The writing became a hobby in the background: it took a back seat to parenthood and being a person and being a human being.”

“There is no single cause of homelessness, and vulnerable people, those with mental health problems and addictions for example, need support not punishment.”

“I was a good fielder in the gully in my college days. But in the outfield, I was not such a good fielder.”

“Schools alone are not to blame for underachievement. The breakdown of the family, poverty, and decaying cities with eroding tax bases have made a good public school education nearly impossib...”

“What I did by virtue of skipping a lot of classes was get two undergraduate degrees and a master's in four years. It wasn't slacking. There were much more productive ways of learning everyth...”

“I wasted a lot of years working on my writing and very grandly saying, 'And now... My Novel!,' which would soon be reduced to a short story, then to a paragraph.”

“When I work with artists, I give them a general guideline of what my vision is. Then they're going to speak their minds on how they view it, too. The song that defines 'Neon Future' the best...”

“I guess that is what wounded souls do. They carefully annihilate the essence and self-worth of another, embedding seeds of their sinister darkness into them, so that with time, they create p...”

“Your own need to be shines out of any dream or creation you imagine.”

“That what cannot be expressed in words but is felt with the heart holds all in its warm embrace. This is our true nature as it unites us all. It is Love.”

“All you need do is listen to very smart people and sift out the ideas that are unworthy or implausible, and I wouldn't pretend for a moment that I hadn't made lots of mistakes and there are...”

“Any time I wind up in the lane where you can't quickly turn off of it and it's turning into the freeway, I just start screaming until I'm off of it.”

“Tears teaches a man to trust in Truthful God.”

“Just personally, I've been attached to 'On the Road' since 2007 and it was the greatest thing in my life when I got cast in it. I couldn't believe it. When I was 17 and read the book, I look...”

“I don't think we're progressing. I don't even think this is Development. Do we ever know the truth about our reality with all these logical assumptions which are based upon a grand stack of...”

“Hey Susie Derkins, is that your face, or is a 'possum stuck in your collar?”

“The traditional spokespersons for the Evangelicals, such as Chuck Colson and James Dobson, have become alarmed about this drift away from the 'Family Values' issues that they believe should...”

“There's a lot of spirituality and hope in our music that I think people are catching on to. It's not punk, it's not Green Day, not Offspring, not Soundgarden, not Stone Temple Pilots, not al...”

“It's super trippy coming to America because we know everything about it - from music and film. I know what a Southern accent sounds like; I know what a New York accent sounds like.”

“I was reading a book... 'the history of glue' - I couldn't put it down.”

“I've got no timetable. I'm sort of sick of timetables, to be honest.”

“I believe that maturity is not an outgrowing, but a growing up: that an adult is not a dead child, but a child who survived. I believe that all the best faculties of a mature human being exi...”

“You've got to change incentives for good behavior as opposed to just disincentivizing bad behavior.”

“We will be judged. There will be an accounting; there will be a reckoning sooner or later. It will either come from ourselves and our own conscience, or it will come from our kids when they...”

“I was 17 the first time I set foot in a classroom, but 10 years later, I would graduate from Cambridge with a Ph.D. 'Educated' is the story of how I came by my education. It is also the stor...”

“Certainties are arrived at only on foot.”

“The only thing I think of is the next hit record.”

“Drop the idea that you are Atlas carrying the world on your shoulders. The world would go on even without you. Don't take yourself so seriously.”

“We never thought it would be something everyone would listen to. We never thought people who listen to Britney Spears would run to listen to it. It was intended for people on the fanatical s...”

“Do not let the roles you play in life make you forget who you are.”

“For a while, I became a model scout and agent, thinking naively I could change the industry from the inside, and even kicked off the famous 'size zero debate' with an article I wrote to the...”

“The ox suffers, the cart complains.”

“If you have enough people sitting around telling you you're wonderful, then you start believing you're fabulous, then someone tells you you stink and you believe that too!”

“I want women to see, especially us big women, that you don't have to let them cut you and suck it out. You don't have to let them staple you up. You don't have to let them give you a pill. Y...”

“You can hear the Celtic heartbeat all over Europe and America, from Bing Crosby to Jack White, from the Smiths to My Bloody Valentine, from House of Pain to Marky Mark and the Funky Bunch.”

“I'm an academic. I did my PhD in fluid dynamics and now I work at the University College London in an interdisciplinary department looking at patterns of human behaviour in urban settings.”

“I will keep repeating, that if you find me guilty of corruption then take the strictest action against me.”

“Opportunities are usually disguised as hard work, so most people don't recognize them.”

“I like Nine Inch Nails, and I like hip-hop.”

“We defeated communism in part by showing the world that a commitment to democracy and expanding economic opportunity makes people's lives better and nations more secure, meaning our commitme...”

“The negotiations were simultaneously cerebral and physical, abstract and personal, something like a combination of chess and mountain climbing.”

“The unread story is not a story; it is little black marks on wood pulp. The reader, reading it, makes it live: a live thing, a story.”

“Whether it was a shoe store or working the front desk of a hotel, I was always interacting with people. I'd get that look because I'm half-white and half-Filipino. They could tell I was some...”

“I love developing children as characters. Children rarely have important roles in literary fiction - they are usually defined as cute or precious, or they create a plot by being kidnapped or...”