Brits and Americans have hundreds of different phrases for the same thing. Luckily it's usually a source of amusement rather than frustration. A flashlight by any other name is still a torch. My personal favourite is 'fairy lights ' which we boringly refer to as 'Christmas lights.'

I don't know why you use a fancy French word like detente when there's a good English phrase for it - cold war.

I wish I had coined the phrase 'tyranny of choice ' but someone beat me to it. The counterintuitive truth is that have an abundance of options does not make you feel privileged and indulged too many options make you feel like all of them are wrong and that you are wrong if you choose any of them.

The technology that threatens to kill off books as we know them - the 'physical book ' a new phrase in our language - is also making the physical book capable of being more beautiful than books have been since the middle ages.

Success is like a liberation or the first phrase of a love story.

It's very hard to imagine the phrase 'consumer society' used so cheerfully and interpreted so enthusiastically in England.

The catch phrase for the day is 'Do an act of kindness. Help one person smile.'

The phrase 'off with the crack of the bat' while romantic is really meaningless since the outfielder should be in motion long before he hears the sound of the ball meeting the bat.

A jealous lover of human liberty deeming it the absolute condition of all that we admire and respect in humanity I reverse the phrase of Voltaire and say that if God really existed it would be necessary to abolish him.

He fertilizes a phrase or a line of poetry for weeks and then gives birth to it in a speech.

There is probably nothing wrong with art for art's sake if we take the phrase seriously and not take it to mean the kind of poetry written in England forty years ago.

When you translate poetry in particular you're obliged to look at how the writer with whom you're working puts together words sentences phrases the triple tension between the line of verse the syntax and the sentence.

You pick up loads of baggage with your first record with reaction to it from fans and critics. So I went to Ireland by myself for a couple of weeks with my guitar. I read lots of poetry I read Patti Smith's autobiography and started words and phrases and then songs started to take shape.

My diminished girth in tailor phraseology was hardly conceivable even by my own friends or my respected medical adviser until I put on my former clothing over what I now wear which is a thoroughly convincing proof of the remarkable change.

Listen to any musical phrase or rhythm and grasp it as a whole and you thereupon have present in you the image so to speak of the divine knowledge of the temporal order.

It's in the history books the Holocaust. It's just a phrase. And the truth is it happened yesterday. It happened to my mother. I never met my grandmothers or my grandfathers. They were all wiped up in the gas chambers of Nazi Germany.

I see happiness as a by-product. I don't think you can pursue happiness. I think that phrase is one of the very few mistakes the Founding Fathers made.