Whatever words we utter should be chosen with care for people will hear them and be influenced by them for good or ill.

All families had their special Christmas food. Ours was called Dutch Bread, made from a dough halfway between bread and cake, stuffed with citron and every sort of nut from the farm - hazel, black walnut, hickory, butternut.

The most classic French dessert around the holidays is the Christmas log, with butter cream. Two flavors. Chocolate and coconut. My first job in the kitchen when I was a boy was to make these Christmas logs.

Metamorphosis has always been the greatest symbol of change for poets and artists. Imagine that you could be a caterpillar one moment and a butterfly the next.

Going into auditions, there is a wonderful butterfly feeling in your stomach - an equal balance of being utterly terrified and exhilarated that this is your chance.

Some folk want their luck buttered.

Dirt has given me a really good car control ability, but it would have been an easier transition if I'd been racing pavement my whole life. But off-road has given me such a good foundation for car control when the car is loose, because the competitions are so intense - basically 30 minutes of utter chaos.

I hate the hand that comes out of a car and just drops litter in the street. I hate that! For some reason, it just fills me with fury! It's just utter laziness, lack of interest in other people, lack of interest in the planet, in the hedgehog who might eat the plastic bag, it's a lack of concern.

I grew up going to bakeries in Tel Aviv; that's where we got our birthday cakes, they were always European baking and butter creams. We have such good baking in Israel, and we have the Diaspora of Jews from all over, and we learned early on to adapt and absorb flavors from all over.

During the summer of 2000, in the run-up to Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother's 100th birthday, I asked the Duke of Edinburgh if he was hoping to reach 100. 'Good God, no,' he spluttered, 'I can't imagine anything worse. What a ghastly idea.'

A blessed thing it is for any man or woman to have a friend, one human soul whom we can trust utterly, who knows the best and worst of us, and who loves us in spite of all our faults.

If you can visualize the whole of spring and see Paradise with the eye of belief, you may understand the utter majesty of everlasting Beauty. If you respond to that Beauty with the beauty of belief and worship, you will be a most beautiful creature.

I do love beauty. I love beautiful tilings. I grow orchids and collect butterflies. But when it comes to relationships, you have to find the person inside.

I utterly reject the view that the Third World is doomed to poverty and starvation. Not only is this wrong, I think this attitude verges on the immoral, like thinking that slavery is an unalterable facet of the human condition so why bother doing anything about it?

Art is the fatal net which catches these strange moments on the wing like mysterious butterflies, fleeing the innocence and distraction of common men.

All art is propaganda, and ever must be, despite the wailing of the purists. I stand in utter shamelessness and say that whatever art I have for writing has been used always for propaganda for gaining the right of black folk to love and enjoy. I do not care a damn for any art that is not used for propaganda.

It is more important to click with people than to click the shutter.

Abstract art: a product of the untalented sold by the unprincipled to the utterly bewildered.

Art is about finding creativity in the gutter next to you.

To have the beginning of a truly great story, you need to have a character you're completely and utterly obsessed with. Without obsession, to the point of a maddening addiction,there's no point to continue.

She said she never wanted to have secrets from me nor from herself, which is why she wanted to write down everything that otherwise would be hard to talk about. As I said, later I understood that someone who flees into honesty like that fears something, fears that her life will fill with something that can no longer be shared, a genuine secret, indescribable, unutterable.

Chris Claremont once said of Alan Moore, "if he could plot, we'd all have to get together and kill him." Which utterly misses the most compelling part of Alan's writing, the way he develops and expresses ideas and character. Plot does not define story. Plot is the framework within which ideas are explored and personalities and relationships are unfolded.

To write or even speak English is not a science but an art. There are no reliable words. Whoever writes English is involved in a struggle that never lets up even for a sentence. He is struggling against vagueness, against obscurity, against the lure of the decorative adjective, against the encroachment of Latin and Greek, and, above all, against the worn-out phrases and dead metaphors with which the language is cluttered up.

The imagination needs moodling,--long, inefficient happy idling, dawdling and puttering.