I believed there were no Hypotheticals in the sense of consciously acting agents - conscious entities. There was only the process. The needles of evolution, endlessly knitting.

We're as ephemeral as raindrops. We all fall, and we all land somewhere.

[There was] only one news channel, overseen by a bland and complexly multicultural board of advisors. It broadcast in fifteen languages and was, as a rule, interesting in none of them.

Nobody wants to conduct an autopsy on a dead saint.

For such people the consummate act of moral clarity was a lynching or a suicide bombing, a fatwa or a pogrom. And they were ascendant now, rising like dark stars over a terminal landscape .

We spent a lot of time discussing cosmology first. I think that was your father's unique way of evaluating people. You can tell a lot about a person, he once said, by the way they look at the stars.

To capture the pawn, threaten the queen.

We're all born strangers to ourselves and each other, and we're seldom formally introduced.

I don't believe money is evil, but it can be terribly corrosive.

I won't put my ignorance on an altar and call it God. It feels like idolatry, like the worst kind of idolatry.

Everybody falls, and we all land somewhere.

Turkeys can run with eagles but cannot fly with them.

Many strokes though with a little axe hew down and fell the hardest-timber'd oak.

The Kyoto Protocol is a death pact, however strange it may sound, because its main aim is to strangle economic growth and economic activity in countries that accept the protocol's requirements.

I'm satisfied to go in at the bottom - that's the best way to learn what things are all about.

I still have to work on my weight and some of my other demons.

I haven't wanted to play a mother for a long time because I am one

The man who thinks with Horace thinks divine.

I used to think it was clever to confuse comedy with tragedy. Now I wish I could distinguish them.

No matter how rich you are, you cannot transport yourself to the future or the past.

The world is begging for you to lead.