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.

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.

Did you ever hear anyone say, 'That work had better be banned because I might read it and it might be very damaging to me'?

They lay together in a sheltered place among the ruins of Brasilia while deathbeams from Chinese EMVs played like blue searchlights on broken ceramic walls.

You can never win resentment with an argument—only love can do that.

I sailed on the cold air currents above the rooftops of Paris. I could see the river, the Louvre Museum, the gardens and palaces. And a mouse-yum. Hang on, Carter, I thought. not hunting mice.

There is nothing wrongwith enjoying life’s luxuriesas long as your happinessisn’t contingent on them.

The sweetness of this life is found in remembering Allah; the sweetness of the next life will be found in seeing Him.

Interleaf is very nice. I expect there to be a lot of competition for programs like that.

I am! I have come through! I belong!

I hate Danny Kaye movies.

The only way to break the chains of fear and doubt is to know in your heart that God loves you-no matter what.