The society was so different [in China] - it was a feudalistic society. It didn't come to a point of industrial revolution until twenty years ago.

When they called me with the Nobel call from Secretary General of the Swedish Academy it was twenty minutes to six and he said well that was well hope I'm not disturbing you but I am the Secretary General of the Swedish Academy. Of course you can imagine I was frozen in time when he said that but then he made a very famous statement, something to the effect that this is the last 20 minutes of peace of your life.

What a man knows at fifty that he did not know at twenty is, for the most part, incommunicable.

If a big wave came at the wrong moment, it would sweep me off into forty-eight-degree water, where I might last twenty minutes. Drowning quickly might be better.

Now, of my threescore years and ten,

Now I know That twenty centuries of stony sleep Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle, And what rough beast, its hour come round at last, Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

I have been wounded altogether twenty times; eleven of these wounds were received at Northfield.

Twenty-two million African-Americans - that's what we are - Africans who are in America.

The moment something happens to one you love, it's twenty times more intense. You experience pain and enlightenment on a much vaster scale.

If they're working in a workshop somewhere, where there is, let's say, uh... only twenty people, or something like that, that's still, when they work and do a scene, that's still working in front of somebody.