I’ve always been fascinated with the stealing of innocence. It’s the most heinous crime, and certainly a capital crime if there ever was one.

My mother was always fascinated with the fact that I could rhyme so much stuff.

I learned about serif and san serif typefaces, about varying the amount of space between different letter combinations, about what makes great typography great. It was beautiful, historical, artistically subtle in a way that science can’t capture, and I found it fascinating.

I love crime, I love mysteries, and I love ghosts.

Crimes against children are the most heinous crime. That, for me, would be a reason for capital punishment because children are innocent and need the guidance of an adult society.

One way to make sure crime doesn’t pay would be to let the government run it.

Writers are always writing about infidelity. It’s so dramatic. The wickedness of it, the secrecy, the complications, the finding that you thought you were one person but you’re also this other person. The innocent life and the guilty life. My God, it’s just full of stuff for a writer. I doubt it will ever go out of fashion.

God never meant that people were to wear clothes. He meant we were to be nude. But we were in a state of innocence. Then sin came into the human race and became a blood poisoning.

We don’t seem to be able to check crime, so why not legalize it and then tax it out of business?

Everybody is idealistic when you’re a kid.

Behold the child, by Nature’s kindly law pleased with a rattle, tickled with a straw.

Fear follows crime and is its punishment.

Successful and fortunate crime is called virtue.

He has committed the crime who profits by it.

One crime has to be concealed by another.

In a closed society where everybody’s guilty, the only crime is getting caught. In a world of thieves, the only final sin is stupidity.

For instance, I’m always fascinated to see whether, given the kind of fairly known and established form called popular music, whether there is some magic combination that nobody has hit upon before.

Crime when it succeeds is called virtue.

My friends tease me about the fact that if someone seems bad or shady or like they have a secret, I find them incredibly interesting.

The more laws and order are made prominent, the more thieves and robbers there will be.

The first step towards vice is to shroud innocent actions in mystery, and whoever likes to conceal something sooner or later has reason to conceal it.

Little girls are cute and small only to adults. To one another they are not cute. They are life-sized.

It is a fundamental principle of criminal law that an imputed offense must correspond exactly to the type of crime described by law. If no law applies exactly to the point in question, then there is no offense.

The biggest crime in England is to rise above your station. It’s fine to be a pop star. ‚Oh, it’s great, lots of fun, aren’t they sweet, these pop stars! But to think you have anything to say about how the world should work? What arrogance!‘

I’m just glad I was able to return to some of that innocence and beauty I had as a child when I started my own family, and my children brought me back some of that spirit.

The more you can increase fear of drugs and crime, welfare mothers, immigrants and aliens, the more you control all the people.

Capital punishment is as fundamentally wrong as a cure for crime as charity is wrong as a cure for poverty.

Getting old is a fascination thing. The older you get, the older you want to get.

When I was five – it’s not even bad – I stole a sweet from the sweet shop.

Make crime pay. Become a lawyer.

Whoever blushes is already guilty; true innocence is ashamed of nothing.

Boredom is just the reverse side of fascination: both depend on being outside rather than inside a situation, and one leads to the other.

When I was two, a dragonfly flew near me. A man knocked it to the ground and trod on it. I remember crying because I’d caused the dragonfly to be killed.

Poverty is the mother of crime.

As a member of the Senate Judiciary Committee, I’m concerned about the recklessness of public policy that endangers people’s lives, especially in minority communities, where crime often is such a scourge.

To be famous, in fact, one has only to kill one’s landlady.

To be able to travel the world, especially to places I never thought I’d be… it’s really, you know, still fascinating for me.

In India we only read about death, sickness, terrorism, crime.

There is a blessed necessity by which the interest of men is always driving them to the right; and, again, making all crime mean and ugly.

I believe we are still so innocent. The species are still so innocent that a person who is apt to be murdered believes that the murderer, just before he puts the final wrench on his throat, will have enough compassion to give him one sweet cup of water.

Everybody will make mistakes, and for some that mistake will rise to the level of being a crime.

I’m seeing the world partially through the eyes of a kid. Not all the time. There’s no black and white to it. But sometimes I’m seeing it like I’m 4.

I strongly believe that for serious and violent criminals, we must absolutely hold them accountable for their crimes and send them to prison.

The unforgivable crime is soft hitting. Do not hit at all if it can be avoided; but never hit softly.

We can not play innocents abroad in a world that is not innocent.

Saints should always be judged guilty until they are proved innocent.

Abortion isn’t a lesser evil, it’s a crime. Taking one life to save another, that’s what the Mafia does. It’s a crime. It’s an absolute evil.

How accurately can the law fix the crime? There has to be a mechanism for very fast action. The law is like this: catch them and punish them.

The infectiousness of crime is like that of the plague.

Going to trial with a lawyer who considers your whole life-style a Crime in Progress is not a happy prospect.

When I was a kid, I thought movies just came from air. I thought they just appeared.

The great thieves lead away the little thief.

The newspapers of the twenty-first century will give a mere ‚stick‘ in the back pages to accounts of crime or political controversies, but will headline on the front pages the proclamation of a new scientific hypothesis.

When you’re a little kid, you don’t see color, and the fact that my friends were black never crossed my mind. It never became an issue until I was a teenager and started trying to rap.

All in all, for someone who was immersed in, fascinated by, and dedicated to flight, I was disappointed by the wrinkle in history that had brought me along one generation late. I had missed all the great times and adventures in flight.

Riches have never fascinated me, unless combined with the greatest charm or distinction.

It is better to risk saving a guilty man than to condemn an innocent one.

To cut short the question of the law of retaliation, we must note that even in its primitive form it can operate only between two individuals of whom one is absolutely innocent, and the other absolutely guilty. The victim, to be sure, is innocent. But can the society that is supposed to represent the victim lay claim to innocence?

The common argument that crime is caused by poverty is a kind of slander on the poor.

It is incontestable and deplorable that Negroes have committed crimes; but they are derivative crimes. They are born of the greater crimes of the white society.

There is an innocence in admiration; it is found in those to whom it has never yet occurred that they, too, might be admired some day.