Anger and depression are not diseases or dysfunctions or anomalies; they are perfectly rational responses to the myriad avoidable disappointments that begin in a thoroughly irrational hope.

Roads are no place for naive chickens dreaming of nirvana.

...the greatest source of misery in the world, the greatest cause of anguish and hatred and sadness and death, was neither disease nor race nor religion. It was hope.

My point is that death is more tragic than life, than any life, because every life has hope of some kind.

Kugel was a firm believer that death was not always a bad thing - that life often reached such levels of crapitude that dying was preferable to living.

Written with passion, honesty, humor, and a stubborn, rebellious optimism, Dear Marcus is like nothing I've ever read. When a bullet in the back told Jerry McGill not to go on, Jerry went on-smiling.

Expecting hell, we're ill prepared for heaven.

Sages tell us that the Torah tells us that until the age of thirteen, all of boy's sins are ascribed to his father.

So desperate was Kugel for things to turn out for the best, proclaimed Professor Jove, that he couldn't stop worrying about the worst. Hope, said Professor Jove, was Solomon Kugel's greatest failing.

When you see a child starving and you think government failed. But I think God failed, could not even fill the hunger of a child.

One drop of hatred left in the cup of joy turns the most blissful draught into poison.

This is the problem for which revolutionary theory has yet to find the right solution, if there is one. The difficulty is that the economic interests of the two classes are antagonistic.

Well, I like to be kept on my toes. I look for a challenge. I don't like to recreate steps that I've already walked. I like to see if I can create something new.

Our responsibility as filmmakers is to make things that are fresh, unique and original.

I am very conscious of what I say and do when I go out because the media is quick to make that a story.

I always remind my kids, "I'm your parent, but I'm a human being, too, so I may not be perfect."

Someone once told me to believe 5 percent of what everybody tells you.

My mother raised me to be a writer.

When I begin a story at my desk, the window to my back, the path is not there. As I start to walk, I make the path.