I don't know that I have any role models now that are fixed. Definitely my mom - she's the coolest. She's worked really hard her whole life and I just think she's got a great attitude. Moms just know so much it's so silly.

I hate Valentine's day. It is a day for nothing but disappointment.

If my mom reads that I'm grammatically incorrect I'll have hell to pay.

I demand a lot from myself and reflect this attitude upon others: I consider it to be an important quality for a leader. I also think it is impossible to achieve success without persistence.

That attitude that I wouldn't succeed didn't come from my family; it came from school and then the township we lived in. I wasn't going to settle for that, and my mother warned us not to settle for less, to make the most of our lives.

At the age of 12, my parents gave me a chemistry set for Christmas, and experimentation soon became a consuming passion in my life.

It is sometimes said that the major discoveries have already been made and that there is nothing important left to find. This attitude is altogether too pessimistic. There are plenty of ideas and plenty of things left to discover. The trick is to find the right path from one to the other.

The medicines of today are based upon thousands of years of knowledge accumulated from folklore, serendipity and scientific discovery. The new medicines of tomorrow will be based on the discoveries that are being made now, arising from basic research in laboratories around the world.

After qualifying for a B.Sc. in pharmacology, I spent a few months in Sheffield University as a research worker in the pharmacology department but then went back to Oxford to the Nuffield Institute for Medical Research in order to study for a D. Phil. with Dr. Geoffrey Dawes.

My father got a trade union scholarship to Oxford; he lived and breathed politics; he was always watching current-affairs programmes. But I have a five-year-old child's attitude towards the news. Mainly, that it absolutely turns me off.

Beyonce is one of my inspirations. Her attitude, her style, her voice... she's perfect.

I can't change the direction of the wind, but I can adjust my sails to always reach my destination.

Poverty was the greatest motivating factor in my life.

Love is an ice cream sundae, with all the marvelous coverings. Sex is the cherry on top.

You gotta try your luck at least once a day, because you could be going around lucky all day and not even know it.

God is bigger than people think.

Sausage is a great deal like life. You get out of it about what you put into it.

Nobody, man or woman, has ever wrecked a good marriage.

Start by doing what's necessary; then do what's possible; and suddenly you are doing the impossible.

A single sunbeam is enough to drive away many shadows.

For it is in giving that we receive.

It is in pardoning that we are pardoned.

Where there is charity and wisdom, there is neither fear nor ignorance.

Lord, make me an instrument of thy peace. Where there is hatred, let me sow love.

Lord, grant that I might not so much seek to be loved as to love.

It is not fitting, when one is in God's service, to have a gloomy face or a chilling look.

If God can work through me, he can work through anyone.

Great and glorious God, and Thou Lord Jesus, I pray you shed abroad your light in the darkness of my mind. Be found of me, Lord, so that in all things I may act only in accordance with Thy holy will.

If you have men who will exclude any of God's creatures from the shelter of compassion and pity, you will have men who will deal likewise with their fellow men.

We should never desire to be over others. Instead, we ought to be servants who are submissive to every human being for God's sake.

Pure, holy simplicity confounds all the wisdom of this world and the wisdom of the flesh.

Holy wisdom confounds Satan and all his wickednesses.

While you are proclaiming peace with your lips, be careful to have it even more fully in your heart.

Men lose all the material things they leave behind them in this world, but they carry with them the reward of their charity and the alms they give. For these, they will receive from the Lord the reward and recompense they deserve.

Holy humility confounds pride and all the men of this world and all things that are in the world.

Growing up in an old-fashioned Bengali Hindu family and going to a convent school run by stern Irish nuns, I was brought up to revere rules. Without rules, there was only anarchy.

I had a 2-week courtship with a fellow student in the fiction workshop in Iowa and a 5-minute wedding in a lawyer's office above the coffee shop where we'd been having lunch that day. And so I sent a cable to my father saying, 'By the time you get this, Daddy, I'll already be Mrs. Blaise!'

As a bookish child in Calcutta, I used to thrill to the adventures of bad girls whose pursuit of happiness swept them outside the bounds of social decency. Tess of the d'Urbervilles, Emma Bovary and Anna Karenina lived large in my imagination. The naughty girls of Hollywood films flirted and knew how to drive.

I flew into a small airport surrounded by cornfields and pastures, ready to carry out the two commands my father had written out for me the night before I left Calcutta: Spend two years studying creative writing at the Iowa Writers' Workshop, then come back home and marry the bridegroom he selected for me from our caste and class.

While I gave up God a long time ago, I never shook the habit of wanting to believe in something. So I replaced my creed of everlasting life with life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

The Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, the Civil War - when I really think about them, they all seem about as likely as the parting of the Red Sea.

Almost every economist agrees that the American health care system is unsustainable. Medical care is so expensive that it is busting all of our budgets - government, business, and personal. Eventually, the medical price bubble will pop. What, then, are the alternatives?

Equality under the law is the slow triumph of hope over history.

This Congress is simply not doing its job under Republican leadership.

I think the job of leadership is to expand what can be talked about and to get consensus on the nature of the problem, and that is most of the job. Because once you do that, once you have diagnosis, treatment options are obvious.

True partisans draft legislation that gives themselves everything and their enemies nothing. They love bills that repulse and even disgust the other side. Today's politics have become an all-or-nothing, black-or-white, zero-sum game - it's not a contact sport but a blood sport.

If we don't change, millions of American families are just one medical emergency, or one layoff, away from financial disaster and bankruptcy.

Success can create more madness than happiness.

There are two ways of spreading light: to be the candle or the mirror that reflects it.

Old age, calm, expanded, broad with the haughty breadth of the universe, old age flowing free with the delicious near-by freedom of death.