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.
A cloud is made of billows upon billows upon billows that look like clouds. As you come closer to a cloud you don't get something smooth, but irregularities at a smaller scale.
Most were beginning to feel they had learned enough to last for the rest of their lives. They remained mathematicians, but largely went their own way.
Literature is fighting for its very life because compromise is mistook for ambition, and joining up is preferred to standing out …
I feel very comfortable in New York, in a city where there is no such thing as 'nationality.'
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.
I say 'as it were' or 'so to speak' too often because puns and double entendres keep insinuating themselves into my consciousness as I'm talking.
I ruefully admit that if the cat is asleep in my chair - which she regards as hers, of course - I tend to leave her there and take the other one.
After a while, you start to realize that you should write a book you would want to read. I try to write a book I would enjoy.
It can be hard to write a skillfully entertaining fiction, but a great book wants to be more, and wants more from us.
Reading is a collaboration between the writer and reader. Both parties must keep that in mind when dealing with a work of fiction.” {Guy Gavriel Kay}
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?
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.
