I love movies with spectacle but spectacle can be a performance, it doesn't have to be a creature.

There isn't any way for the people of Nicaragua to find out what's going on in Nicaragua.

I consider myself a bassist first.

Like all forms of collective security, multilateral sanctions require a unanimity rarely achieved in international politics.

We used to have more references to things that we pulled out because they almost felt like they were trying too hard to allude to something.

We are human, and nothing is more interesting to us than humanity.

If you are in a bad relationship with anyone else, it is because you are in a bad relationship with yourself.

It's amazing how, age after age, in country after country, and in all languages, Shakespeare emerges as incomparable.

I try to push ideas away, and the ones that will not leave me alone are the ones that ultimately end up happening.

Mystery is more important than knowledge.

The theories of the major philosophers of the 18th century secular enlightenment were biblical and theological in spite of themselves.

Adopting the language of a pretense only serves to ease participation in it.

an intoxication with forbidden knowledge in which the natural things become unimportant.

As the saying goes, truth is stranger than fiction. But only when the reality has not been subsumed by foamy legends and fantasies that radiate outward from the actual event.

What, then, is this blue sky, which certainly does exist, and which veils from us the stars during the day?

Without playing with fantasy, no creative work has yet come into being.

Silence is a true friend who never betrays.

We are all concerned about the future of American education. But as I tell my students, you do not enter the future - you create the future. The future is created through hard work.

Great hope has no real footing unless one is willing to face into the doom that may also be on the way. p.207

While my cousins were gang-banging, I was trying to learn what the Internet was about.

I am the best-natured creature in the world, and yet I have already killed three, and of these three two were priests.