George Eliot

It will never rain roses: when we want to have more roses we must plant more trees.

There is no private life which has not been determined by a wider public life.

Life began with waking up and loving my mother's face.

Well, I actually wrote her a letter a couple of days ago congratulating her. The tone I tried to convey in the letter is, look, you are a part of a great American historical process.

I was a really bad teenager and I got my tongue pierced. I don't even remember where I did it, but it was under very surreptitious circumstances.

My feeling for reality TV isn't ironic, guilty, or apologetic. Reality TV is one of the few remaining modes of popular entertainment in which characterization is permitted as plot.