With the Hebrew Bible, you're living in an austere world.

We are thrown back on the text, for the most part. Archaeology can give us background. It doesn't either confirm or disprove the Bible, but it may illuminate it.

My own interest is far more in the Hebrew Bible. My religion is more personally related to the Hebrew Bible than it is to the New Testament.

The Garden of Eden presents the same story: If you want to make yourself gods, you'll find you're akin to the animals.

If one attempts to achieve deity or to have the holy, he is thrown back; he is refused. His language is taken from him. He can no longer even communicate. That's the Tower of Babel.

Israel defined its God and its relation to that God in existential, relational terms. They did not, until quite late, approach the question of one God in an abstract philosophical way.

I prefer to have all of this apparatus - historical, literary, critical - and then, beyond initial innocence and naiveté, to try to achieve a new innocence, a new naiveté.

I think we may very well, in many areas, get likelihood, but not certitude. We don't want certitude anyway, do we?

We want to live in ambiguity. This is the human condition.

There was certainly an old law code which stands behind the earliest form of Deuteronomy. Presumably that is what was lost.

There are surely many legitimate approaches to Biblical literature, and I think that it depends very much on one's experience and temperament which way one deals primarily with Biblical material.

I walk. I talk. I shop. I sneeze. I'm gonna be a fireman when the floods roll back. There's trees in the desert since you moved out, and I don't sleep on a bed of bones.

Who will guard us against the guardians?

A fuller expression of Self comes from the journey for greater wholeness.

I'm much happier and more fulfilled than I thought I would ever be, especially when I was going through a lot of grief when I was younger. I hope it lasts.

When Yeats said the center cannot hold, he was talking for himself, but it was true for the rest of us as well.

A picture is something that makes invisible its before and after.

It was dripping and, you know, and there was a whole line of cameras and microphones. I felt like - you remember the honor guards, only it was a dishonor guard.

The press always ends up being much nicer than I expect. A lot of times they say something snarky about you, but then you meet them in person and they couldn't be nicer.

While wine may be only a drink, it is also one of the most complex sensory pleasures we enjoy. It is as cerebral as it is sensual, and it requires a lifetime to appreciate it.

We stayed at home to write, to consolidate our outstretched selves.