Elie [Wiesel], when you ask, "Why do I want to know," I'm trying to grab the holy. And I'm getting thrown back.

We are thrown back on the text, for the most part. Archaeology can give us background. It doesn't either confirm or disprove the Bible, but it may illuminate it.

My own interest is far more in the Hebrew Bible. My religion is more personally related to the Hebrew Bible than it is to the New Testament.

The Garden of Eden presents the same story: If you want to make yourself gods, you'll find you're akin to the animals.

If one attempts to achieve deity or to have the holy, he is thrown back; he is refused. His language is taken from him. He can no longer even communicate. That's the Tower of Babel.

Israel defined its God and its relation to that God in existential, relational terms. They did not, until quite late, approach the question of one God in an abstract philosophical way.

I prefer to have all of this apparatus - historical, literary, critical - and then, beyond initial innocence and naiveté, to try to achieve a new innocence, a new naiveté.

I think we may very well, in many areas, get likelihood, but not certitude. We don't want certitude anyway, do we?

We want to live in ambiguity. This is the human condition.

There was certainly an old law code which stands behind the earliest form of Deuteronomy. Presumably that is what was lost.

With the Hebrew Bible, you're living in an austere world.

In the human society, it is difficult to find all angels flapping there wings and all saints singing halleluya.

Alex the waiter was on my Spank Naughty list in third place, right after Henry Calvill the actor, then Henry Calvill as Superman. He was proof that God existed, and that God loved straight women.

Every criticism, judgment, diagnosis, and expression of anger is the tragic expression of an unmet need.

Nathan Sutter," the teacher read. Here. My mother never calls me Nathan." Is it Nate?" She calls me Honeylips.

The true grandeur of humanity is in moral elevation, sustained, enlightened and decorated by the intellect of man

God is worthy of my loving obedience because of who He is, not because of what he does.

Play is the state of mind that we can use in our creative process to our advantage.

If you want your girls to feel strong and intelligent and be outspoken and fight for what they think is right, then I want to be that type of role model.

The Shades never recorded anything, Little Daddy and the Bachelors recorded a couple of records, ya.