If you aren't failing every now and then, you're probably playing it too safe.

I call that mind free which jealously guards its intellectual rights and powers, which calls no man master, which does not content itself with a passive or hereditary faith, [and] receives new truth as an angel from Heaven.

I'm short enough and ugly enough to succeed on my own.

I see no advantages in aging whatsoever. You become shriveled. You become decrepit. You lose your faculties. Your peer group passes away. You sit in a room gumming your porridge. I don't see any advantage in this whatsoever.

To me nature is... spiders and bugs, and big fish eating little fish, and plants eating plans, and animals eating... It's like an enormous restaurant, that's the way I see it.

For some reason I've always had an irrational love for New York. There's no reason that you would necessarily like it on paper. It's very expensive.

I feel humor is important for those two reasons: that it is a little bit of refreshment like music, and that women have told me over the years that it is very, very important to them.