Were Quotes

At first, it was hard to sit down and read the things that people were saying. A lot of people would've worked their way up to this position and would've gotten a thick skin over a few years' time. For me, though, all this happened in a few months.

A personal offense is like a scratch on a phonograph record. I couldn't move my thoughts beyond my pain. It kept repeating, as if I were stuck within its grooves. There was only one way to play beyond it. I had to forgive them, so my heart could take its form again.

If I had to put a name to it, I would wish that all my books were entertainments. I think the first thing you've got to do is grab the reader by the ear, and make him sit down and listen. Make him laugh, make him feel. We all want to be entertained at a very high level.

The great thing about being a print journalist is that you are permitted to duck. Cameramen get killed while the writers are flat on the floor. A war correspondent for the BBC dedicated his memoir to 50 fallen colleagues, and I guarantee you they were all taking pictures. I am only alive because I am such a chicken.

I don't mind doing interviews. I don't mind answering thoughtful questions. But I'm not thrilled about answering questions like, 'If you were being mugged, and you had a lightsaber in one pocket and a whip in the other, which would you use?'

If you young fellows were wise, the devil couldn't do anything to you, but since you aren't wise, you need us who are old.

The framers of the Constitution were so clear in the federalist papers and elsewhere that they felt an independent judiciary was critical to the success of the nation.

My dad was a bartender. My mom was a cashier, a maid and a stock clerk at K-Mart. They never made it big. They were never rich. And yet they were successful. Because just a few decades removed from hopelessness, they made possible for us all the things that had been impossible for them.

We gave up some of our country to the white men, thinking that then we could have peace. We were mistaken. The white man would not let us alone.

I believe we have become paralyzed, paralyzed by our desire to be loved. Now our founding fathers had the wisdom to know that social acceptance and popularity were fleeing, and that this country's principles needed to be rooted in strengths greater than the passions and the emotions of the times.

Patriotism is your conviction that this country is superior to all others because you were born in it.

One who never turned his back but marched breast forward, never doubted clouds would break, Never dreamed, though right were worsted, wrong would triumph, Held we fall to rise, are baffled to fight better, sleep to wake.

Things ain't what they used to be and never were.

I really would love to do a piece like Julia Roberts or Charlize Theron in 'Erin Brockovich' or 'North Country.' They were both so amazing and so inspiring. I would love to touch someone in the way their performances touched me.

I didn't want o do metal work and get my hands all nicked up and be around guys. So I took drama because there were a lot of girls.

When you're a little kid, you don't see color, and the fact that my friends were black never crossed my mind. It never became an issue until I was a teenager and started trying to rap.

I grew up in South Africa and I would look at maps and we were at the bottom of the world. There was this whole thing up there. I was always reading encyclopedias about the world. So travel was something I was always attracted to.

Think of and look at your work as though it were done by your enemy. I you look at it to admire it, you are lost.

My friend, I am going to tell you the story of my life, as you wish; and if it were only the story of my life I think I would not tell it; for what is one man that he should make much of his winters, even when they bend him like a heavy snow?

If time were the wicked sheriff in a horse opera, I'd pay for riding lessons and take his gun away.

If you love somebody, let them go, for if they return, they were always yours. And if they don't, they never were.

I was a camp counselor for kids whose moms were on welfare, unfortunately, and right across the camp was the best, most pristine and preppy camp in the universe.

Would that I were a dry well, and that the people tossed stones into me, for that would be easier than to be a spring of flowing water that the thirsty pass by, and from which they avoid drinking.

The banks are not lending, at least from what I see. They were so wild and reckless back in the good times that they got burned terribly.

Both my parents are English and came out to Australia in 1967. I was born the following year. My parents, and immigrants like them, were known as '£10 poms.' Back then, the Australian government was trying to get educated British people and Canadians - to be honest, educated white people - to come and live in Australia.

There was one occasion when I was very young - eight years or seven years old - that Jewish businessmen went through the forest, and they were assassinated. And that was for the first time I saw in our paper where there were assassinations in our place.

Who were the fools who spread the story that brute force cannot kill ideas? Nothing is easier. And once they are dead they are no more than corpses.

If I could have convinced more slaves that they were slaves, I could have freed thousands more.

We are who we're going to be when we're very old, and when we're very old we are who we were when we were 8.

For me, Barack Obama's election was a milestone of the most extraordinary kind. On the day he was elected I felt such hope in my heart. I thought we were seeing the beginning of a new era of equal opportunity across race and gender such as America had never known before.