If you want to really deeply touch the viewer or the reader, the theater might be the most powerful way to do it.

The secret of a happy life is respect. Respect for yourself and respect for others.

I see the American experience as being defined by the immigrant paradigm of rupture and renewal: rupture with the old world, the old ways, and renewal of the self in a bright but difficult New World.

Here's the problem: we are living in a time when the act of reading is changing. The nature of a reader's attention is changing. The capacity for deep literary engagement is changing.

I think that literary forms are losing their capacity to connect people to issues, to the experiences that feel most meaningful to them.

I don't have an ideal reader. I'm trying to reach something simple and, I believe, universal, in every single person.

I don't know what it's like to be Jewish, but I suspect there is some aspect of that: being Jewish is the thing that bonds you as opposed to being Jewish from Poland, or Jewish from Hungary.

I have no interest in problematizing things. So what I am writing to is that simple sense of being human in myself.

I don't want to test that simple sense of being human. I don't want to transform it.

The Quran is many different things, and we also have to see the Quran almost as a secondary source commenting on the Old Testament.

In my early 30s, I started to realise I was avoiding something on a personal level, but also as a writer. I was in denial about who I was, and was trying to be someone who I was not.

God did not force Salvation on humanity

It’s up to you to make your dreams real.

Never look at an opportunity at face value & pass it on that basis. Examine the income vs. the profit vs. expenses then make your decision.

I have reached no conclusions, have erected no boundaries, shutting out and shutting in, separating inside from outside: I have drawn no lines

I doubt not God is good, well-meaning, kind

Beauty crowds me till I die. Beauty, mercy have on me! Yet if I expire to-day Let it be in sight of thee!

A lot of women don't know how to love because there's deep reasons for them not knowing how to love. And what I mean by deep reasons is deep and dark reasons.

All men are fools, and with every effort they differ only in the degree.

I think imitation is always the greatest form of flattery.

If it be a sin to covet honor, I am the most offending soul.