Imagination it turns out is a great deal like reporting in your own head. Here is a paradox of fiction-writing. You are crafting something from nothing which means in one sense that none of it is true. Yet in the writing and perhaps in the reading some of a character's actions or lines are truer than others.

Before I do a play I say that I hope it's going to be for as short a time as possible but once you do it it is a paradoxical pleasure. One evening out of two there are five minutes of a miracle and for those five minutes you want to do it again and again. It's like a drug.

How wonderful that we have met with a paradox. Now we have some hope of making progress.

It is the paradox of life that the way to miss pleasure is to seek it first. The very first condition of lasting happiness is that a life should be full of purpose aiming at something outside self.

The paradox is really the pathos of intellectual life and just as only great souls are exposed to passions it is only the great thinker who is exposed to what I call paradoxes which are nothing else than grandiose thoughts in embryo.

In the rush to become all things to all people the federal government has lost sight of its core responsibilities. As a result we're stuck in this frustrating paradox where Washington actually neglects things it's clearly supposed to be doing while interfering in other areas where they are neither welcome nor authorized.

When we talk of freedom and opportunity for all nations the mocking paradoxes in our own society become so clear they can no longer be ignored.

In its famous paradox the equation of money and excrement psychoanalysis becomes the first science to state what common sense and the poets have long known - that the essence of money is in its absolute worthlessness.

The most tragic paradox of our time is to be found in the failure of nation-states to recognize the imperatives of internationalism.

But human experience is usually paradoxical that means incongruous with the phrases of current talk or even current philosophy.

Every experience is a paradox in that it means to be absolute and yet is relative in that it somehow always goes beyond itself and yet never escapes itself.

The paradox of education is precisely this that as one begins to become conscious one begins to examine the society in which he is being educated.

The paradox of education is precisely this - that as one begins to become conscious one begins to examine the society in which he is being educated.

We are faced with the paradoxical fact that education has become one of the chief obstacles to intelligence and freedom of thought.

It is great good health to believe as the Hindus do that there are 33 million gods and goddesses in the world. It is great good health to want to understand one's dreams. It is great good health to desire the ambiguous and paradoxical.

There are hundreds of Frank Lloyd Wright buildings around the United States and in other countries too. Wright lived into his 90s and one of his most famous buildings the Guggenheim Museum in New York was completed just before his death. Wright buildings look like Wright buildings - that is their paradox.

My dad's gay experiences really had a very positive influence on me and my straight relationships - how to better accept all the weirdness and ambiguity and ups and downs and paradoxes. I knew from the beginning I was writing about love.