The only way I can be angry at you is when I have thought, said, or done something that is unkind in my own opinion.
Judaism to me, as badly as I practiced it, what I've always loved about it was its total embrace of complexity, its admission of unknowability.
Literature is fighting for its very life because compromise is mistook for ambition, and joining up is preferred to standing out …
Remember, a chip on the shoulder is a sure sign of wood higher up.
I'd defend the right for any novelist to experiment with form or language, but if people don't take to it, don't react by making out that they are thick.
That's the news from Lake Woebegon, where all the women are strong, all the men are good-looking, and all the children are above average.
It's most satisfying to have an effect on the public realm - deep down I think it's what every architect wants to do.
From the great Jack London: “You can’t wait for inspiration. You have to go after it with a club.” What inspires you?
Sticking wires into the brain is obviously rather crude. It's hard to do in animals that run around, and there is a physical limit to the number of wires that can be inserted simultaneously.
There is nothing more potent than thought. Deed follows word and word follows thought. And where the thought is mighty and pure, the result is mighty and pure.
I'll usually see a scene in my head, playing like a movie trailer. After I've written that scene, everything takes off from there.
When a couple has a strong preference for a baby boy or girl, who is injured by allowing them to choose? Certainly not the child.
Compassion is loving others enough to say or do what is appropriate from an empowered heart without attachment to the outcome.
Summer ends, and Autumn comes, and he who would have it otherwise would have high tide always and a full moon every night.
Two sounds of autumn are unmistakable...the hurrying rustle of crisp leaves blown along the street...by a gusty wind, and the gabble of a flock of migrating geese.
Sermons remain one of the last forms of public discourse where it is culturally forbidden to talk back.
What we are seeking so frantically elsewhere may turn out to be the horse we have been riding all along.
A physician is obligated to consider more than a diseased organ, more even than the whole man - he must view the man in his world.
Democracy is based upon the conviction that there are extraordinary possibilities in ordinary people.
The world is moving so fast these days that the one who says it can't be done is generally interrupted by someone doing it.
But what is more, if we have succeeded in adding to the basic understanding of our universe and ourselves, we will have made a contribution to the totality of human culture.
