We are always boosting or trying to prop up the ego by fulfilling some desire or other, and always craving affirmation from the outside.

Gandhi saw how people have to re-think their own individuality before engaging in political activity. Otherwise they're just playing the game that the adversary has set out.

In America, you don't even have proper holidays. It's really one of the most prosperous slave societies in history. People work their asses off all year long and get two weeks off! It's incredible.

The people who encouraged me weren't necessarily writers or readers themselves. They were people who were just pleased to see me devote my life to reading and writing.

I found it really disturbing to see a novelist writing a diatribe about Islam and Muslim radical extremists, blurring the distinction between the two.

The idea that human beings can make history, that is something quite unique to the modern West.

We need to infuse politics with ideas like compassion and empathy, and a sense that we live in an interdependent world.

The asymmetries of power that have shaped relations between the West and the rest of the world also exist in the realm of literary criticism.

Most suffering is human-made and avoidable. It's mostly in your head.

Freedom of speech doesn't guarantee great literature.

In the modern world, nationalism remains a very important force. We delude ourselves into thinking that globalization has made all of that redundant and that everyone just wants to be like America.

If you’re not carefulyou’ll end up believing this is the world

Writing is the one thing I know I will never grow tired of in life

I got offstage and was just looking at my hands, and they were shaking. I was like, 'I wanna kill someone! What's happening?'

.... we are a part of nature as a whole, whose order we follow.

Men call their sons Paul and their dogs Nero today.

I like it when girls are screaming for me. It makes me feel really player-like. I enjoy being out there, delivering my songs, and putting a face to the music.

Cognitive science is a rapidly developing area, so it could be that there are some surprises around the corner. That does seem to be kind of where the trend line is leading.

Since I was cut from the reedbed I have made this crying sound. Anyone separated from someone he loves understands what I say. Anyone pulled from a Source longs to go back.

They say, You can't give a smile away; it always comes back. The same is true of a kind word or a conversation starter. What goes around, comes around.

But the gray and the cold are haunted by a beauty akin to pain, by a sense of a something wanted that never will come again.