“Why would someone use magic to kill a jazz musician in the middle of his set? I mean, I have my problems with the New Thing and the rest of the atonal modernists but I wouldn’t kill someone for playing it–at least not if I wasn’t trapped in the same room.”

Asked to reveal how he would wear his hair at his first American Idol Concert Tour 2007. http://www.palmbeachpost.com/blogs/content/shared-blogs/palmbeach/streeter/entries/2007/07/american_idol_l_2.html

Girl, Interrupted (1994)
Context: It’s important to cultivate detachment. One way to do this is to practice imagining yourself dead, or in the process of dying. If there’s a window, you must imagine your body falling out the window. If there’s a knife, you must imagine the knife piercing your skin. If there’s a train coming, you must imagine your torso flattened under its wheels. These exercises are necessary to achieving the proper distance. The motive is paramount. Without a strong motive, you’re sunk. My motives were weak: an American-history paper I didn’t want to write and the question I’d asked months earlier, Why not kill myself? Dead, I wouldn’t have to write the paper. Nor would I have to keep debating the question.

Town hall meeting, Staten Island, New York (27 April 2011). http://thehill.com/blogs/floor-action/house/158415-conservative-lawmaker-meets-another-crowd-angered-by-rep-ryans-budget <br class="br">2010s

And you know, well, I'm not sure.
The Glenn Beck Program
Premiere Radio Networks
2005-05-17
Radio host Glenn Beck "thinking about killing Michael Moore"
Media Matters for America
2005-05-18
http://mediamatters.org/items/200505180008
Posed question: What would people do for $50 million?
2000s

Source: Awaken

Source: The Looking Glass Wars

And the Sargent came over, pinned a medal on me, sent me down the hall, said, "You're our boy."
Alice's Restaurant Massacree

Interview with Robert David Sullivan<!-- published/quoted where? -->
Context: "I love things made out of animals," Sedaris says, holding a knife with a hoof for a handle. "It's just so funny to think of someone saying, 'I need a letter opener. I guess I'll have to kill a deer.'"

In an interview with Stone Phillips, Dateline NBC (29 November 1994)