"The results are something I can't control, so I can't say 'damnit, I didn't place in the top three today.' I can't control any of that. I just skate. And my goal was to show my heart, to take them on a journey with me so they can feel me."

"I want people to be taken away to another planet when they watch me skate. I want them to be transported into a dream world."

"I’m not intimidated by anything, except maybe PETA standing outside with a bucket of blood."

"Out of ugly, I think the most important thing to do in life is to make something beautiful."

"If he doesn’t want to skate to music that’s pretty and wear a pretty costume, then go rollerblade or skateboard or do one of those extreme sports."

"I’d love to see a 6-foot-2-tall, skinny man doing a halfpipe on figure skates."

"There are some things I keep sacred. My middle name. Who I sleep with. And what kind of hand moisturizer I use."

"I'm 40 now. When I'm dead, hopefully this house will still be going."

"Thank you for your kind invitation. As someone who has enjoyed visiting Russia in the past and can also claim a degree of Russian ancestry, it would make me happy to say yes. However, as a gay man, I must decline. I am deeply troubled by the current attitude toward and treatment of gay men and women by the Russian government. The situation is in no way acceptable, and I cannot in good conscience participate in a celebratory occasion hosted by a country where people like myself are being systematically denied their basic right to live and love openly. Perhaps, when and if circumstances improve, I'll be free to make a different choice."

"I've never seen American Idol but I am grateful to them. That show is one of Fox's biggest moneymakers, and some of that money goes to pay for shows like Prison Break. Simon Cowell's been signing my paychecks and for that I say thanks."

"A great book provides escapism for me. The artistry and the creativity in a story are better than any drugs."

"Confidence is at the root of so many attractive qualities - a sense of humor, a sense of style, a willingness to be who you are no matter what anyone else might think or say."

"El original es infiel a la traducción."

"One of the vilest men of his time."

"Je n'aime pas à résister à la tentation."

"A male Horace Walpole."

"J'aurois grande envie de voir ce palais souterrein, rempli d'objets intéressans pour les gens de notre espèce; il n'est rien que j'aime autant que les caverns; mon goût pour les cadavres & les momies est décidé."

"Eternal Power! Grant me through obvious clouds one transient gleam Of thy bright essence in my dying hour!"

"Quand il étoit en colère, un de ses yeux devenoit si terrible qu'on n'en pouvoit pas soutenir les regards: le malheureux sur lequel il le fixoit tomboit à la renverse, & quelquefois même expiroit à l'instant. Aussi, dans la crainte de dépeupler ses états, & de faire un désert de son palais, ce prince ne se mettoit en colère que très-rarement."

"The great Apostle of Paederasty."

"His highs are achieved without drugs - they are born of a serious lust for life."

"[Vathek] has, in parts, been called, but to some judgments, never is, dull: it is certainly in parts, grotesque, extravagant and even nasty. But Beckford could plead sufficient "local colour" for it, and a contrast, again almost Shakespearean, between the flickering farce atrocities of the beginning and the sombre magnificence of the end. Beckford's claims, in fact, rest on the half-score or even half-dozen pages towards the end: but these pages are hard to parallel in the later literature of prose fiction."

"I fear I shall never be…good for anything in this world, but composing airs, building towers, forming gardens, collecting old Japan, and writing a journey to China or the Moon."

"When I send up the verkramptes, I am always sending up the verkrampte ghosts in me. But I never poke fun at people - it's their ATTITUDES that I find funny. Some of them seem to have their scripts all mixed up."

"Soon censorship will become a luxury of the past. When I recently spoke to an okie connected with the censor board about why 'Mad Max' wasn't banned, his reply was that the youth of today must get used to violence as that will soon be their way of life! It's a sobering thought."

"I'm just the dumb blonde with the jewelery!"

"So talented he's enough to drive any aspiring writer to OD on Smarties - or at least encourage them to stick to writing out place-settings for dinner parties."

"Underneath the bitchy bon mots is a satirist of serious commitment."

"I cannot imagine why my vision will have some value in the world..and yet I know it will..I think I will count because I am patient and recueilli (contemplative) in some degree."

"I am going to do some drawings or paintings...in the mirror of my wardrobe..with myself as a figure doing something."

"When you're on Earth, if you go to the top of a mountain, the stars look much brighter than they do at sea level. And because the space shuttle is above Earth's atmosphere, it's like being on a very, very high mountain. So they look brighter, but not bigger."

"There might be very primitive life in our solar system — single-cell animals, that sort of thing. We may know the answer to that in five or ten years. There is very likely to be life in other solar systems, in planets around other stars. But we won't know about that for a long time."

"When you're getting ready to launch into space, you're sitting on a big explosion waiting to happen. So most astronauts getting ready to lift off are excited and very anxious and worried about that explosion — because if something goes wrong in the first seconds of launch, there's not very much you can do."

"It takes a few years to prepare for a space mission. It takes a couple of years just to get the background and knowledge that you need before you can go into detailed training for your mission. So most astronauts are astronauts for a couple of years before they are assigned to a flight. Once you are assigned to a flight, the whole crew is assigned at the same time, and then that crew trains together for a whole year to prepare for that flight."

"It's easy to sleep floating around — it's very comfortable. But you have to be careful that you don't float into somebody or something!"

"The view of Earth is spectacular. The shuttle is pretty close to Earth. It only flies between 200 and 350 miles above Earth. So it's really pretty close. So we don't see the whole planet, like the astronauts who went to the moon did. So we can see much more detail. We can see cities during the day and at night, and we can watch rivers dump sediment into the ocean, and see hurricanes form. It's just a lot of fun and very interesting to look out the window."

"Most people have only half developed their single personalities. That a man should split his into four and more; and should develop each separately and perfectly, was so abnormal that many normals failed to understand it."

"Pray for the repose of His soul. He was so tired."

"That cold white candent voice which was more caustic than silver nitrate and more thrilling than a scream."

"He seems to have been a serpent of serpents in the bosom of all the nineties. That in itself endears him to one."

"Brisk and prompt to war, soft and not in the least able to resist calamity, fickle in catching at schemes, and always striving after novelties – French characteristics remained unaltered twenty centuries after Julius Caesar made a note of them for all time."

"He took the imperial hand and shook it in the glad-to-see-you-but-keep-off English fashion."

"Rolfe's vice was spiritual more than it was carnal: it might be said that he was a pander and a swindler, because he cared for nothing but his faith. He would be a priest or nothing, so nothing it had to be…If he could not have Heaven, he would have Hell, and the last footprints seem to point unmistakably towards the Inferno."

"An appeal to a goodness which is not in him is, to a vain and sensitive soul, a stinging insult."

"People think that if you get up onstage, a joke is funny or it’s not. No. The audience is participating in this conversation. The audience brings their own baggage. So I would never say you cannot do rape jokes. I’m just saying can we please acknowledge that women get raped? Men also. People get raped, and it’s traumatizing, and we do not have a language or a narrative in which to place that wider trauma. So just having throw-away punch lines, sure, you can do it, but people get triggered, and the reason people get triggered is because other people don’t care. They’re like, “We think it’s funny; get over yourself.” That’s because there’s no broader cultural context for the viewpoint of people who’ve been traumatized. I don’t believe in censorship, but I don’t think it’s a bad thing to say, “Hey, be better.”"

"A Netflix deal is fantastic, but it hasn’t changed my life, because I keep my life small."

"(You spend time in the new special responding to your online trolls. Why not just ignore them? Isn’t devoting time to them a way of giving them power?) These people are actually humans. They live and they say things and they mean it, and I can’t believe that in all aspects of their life they’re that crazy. I don’t want to live in a vacuum where I’m like, There are those people with dumb ideas. I want them to know their ideas are dumb but they’re not dumb."

"In recent years, the public has slowly become familiar with the idea that women with Autism exist, and a few excellent books like Jenara Nerenberg's Divergent Mind and Rudy Simone's Aspergirls have worked to build awareness of this population. It's also helped that high-profile Autistic women like comedian Hannah Gadsby and writer Nicole Cliffe have come out publicly as Autistic."

"There’s a lot about me that people are like, ‘‘Ah, look, lesbian,’’ and really it’s about me not wanting to think about my physical self so I can just get on with things."