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.

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.

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

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.

The price of ignorance is usually a life of frustration and destruction.

Network administrators all share an abiding and passionate desire for one thing: We want our users to shut up.

Entrepreneurship is all about making life easier for humanity, while money becomes a bye-product.

Frankly, health care and politics are "inextricably intertwined."

Oxford is Oxford: not a mere receptacle for youth, like Cambridge. Perhaps it wants its inmates to love it rather than to love one another.

Major social movements eventually fade into the landscape not because they have diminished but because they have become a permanent part of our perceptions and experience.

Yet through delivery orators succeed, I feel that I am far behind indeed. [Ger., Allein der Vortrag macht des Redners Gluck, Ich fuhl es wohl noch bin ich weit zuruck.]

The conduct of our lives is the true mirror of our doctrine.

For I consider the character of no man affected by a want of success, provided he has made an honest effort to succeed.

Rumour was the messenger Of defamation, and so swift, that none Could be the first to tell an evil tale.