Beauty doesn’t have to be about anything. What’s a vase about? What’s a sunset or a flower about? What, for that matter, is Mozart’s Twenty-third Piano Concerto about?

I’m tired of all this nonsense about beauty being only skin-deep. That’s deep enough. What do you want — an adorable pancreas?

That’s always seemed so ridiculous to me, that people want to be around someone because they’re pretty. It’s like picking your breakfeast cereals based on color instead of taste.

There are no bad pictures; that’s just how your face looks sometimes.

I start each book when it's ready and never before.

I never talk about my next project.

We must begin seeing other creatures as equal. Existence makes us all equal.

I know from having had a child, and from having been a child myself, that children will copy you.

My interest in creating anything is that it be useful.

You don't always have to be doing something. You can just be, and that's plenty.

At Sarah Lawrence, I realized that everybody was already what they were going to be. The painters were painting, the writers writing, the dancers dancing. And nobody wore any makeup. The art was uppermost.

Some writers sit down without a thought of what they are going to say, and they go through draft after draft.

We should not look down on our first ancestors.

I cry so much less than I used to. I used to be one of the most teary people.

Beauty is in the eye of the beholder.

A lot of the things that will really improve the world fortunately aren't dependent on Washington doing something different.

People should just buy a CD and rip it. You are legal then.

When Ford sells a car, a dealer isn't allowed to take out the engine and put a different one in. When a newsstand sells the Washington Post, no one can go to the newsstand and pay them to rip out the classified section and put their own classified section in - if they could, they would do so.

Internet TV and the move to the digital approach is quite revolutionary. TV has historically has been a broadcast medium with everybody picking from a very finite number of channels.

Even with cameras being very cheap, one thing that researchers noticed was that you look really bad in a videoconference image because the lighting is bad and you get shadows and things.

The most impactful dollars that Australia can spend are actually what goes to help the poorest.

Should there be cameras everywhere in outdoor streets? My personal view is having cameras in inner cities is a very good thing. In the case of London, petty crime has gone down. They catch terrorists because of it. And if something really bad happens, most of the time you can figure out who did it.

People want to watch whatever video they want to watch whenever they want to watch. If you provision your Internet infrastructure adequately, you can do that.

The common thread for everything I do is this idea of a Web-services architecture. What does that mean? It means taking components of software and systems and having them be self-describing, so that you can aim them, ask them what their capabilities are, and communicate with them using a standard protocol.