Writing my own novels in the '90s...I never imagined that in ten years, science and rationality would require explanation and defense in a world rocked and ruled by religious fervor.

The dachshund is a perfectly engineered dog. It is precisely long enough for a single standard stroke of the back, but you aren't paying for any superfluous leg.

How can you hear your soul if everyone is talking?

When it comes down to it, I don't have much in the way of advice to offer you, but here it is: Read to children. Vote. And never buy anything from a man who's selling fear.

Wisdom begins when you discover the difference between "That doesn't make sense" and "I don't understand.

God save us from idealists! They dream of a world without injustice, and what crime won't they commit to get it! I swear, Mirella, I'll settle for a world with good manners.

The sparrow still falls.

If we keep demanding that God yield up His answers, perhaps some day we will understand them. And then we will be something more than clever apes, and we shall dance with God.

No matter how dark the tapestry God weaves for us, there's always a thread of grace.

Watching him with one eye, she wondered if men ever figured out that they were more appealing when they were pursuing their own work than when they were pursuing a woman.

Love is a debt, she thought. When the bill comes, you pay in grief.

Without space, there is no time.

The rustic, the reader of novels, the pure ascetic: these three are truly happy men

I remember all the things we said we'd doAnd how not a single thing we said was true

No - the light in Tamani's eyes was much more than a reflection. It was the fire that melted her anger and devestated her resolve, every single time she saw it.

Justice is to social justice like a chair to an electric chair.

Confidence isn't optimism or pessimism, and it's not a character attribute. It's the expectation of a positive outcome.

I'm a very hopeful person.

Of course, you would have to be insane to hope your child grows up to be a playwright or poet. Given the odds, you would have to be quite cavalier about your children's future.

I feel very proud to be Mexican. I didn't have the opportunity to learn Spanish when I was a girl, but ... it's never too late to get in touch with your roots.

If you want to do a movie about aliens coming down to Earth nowadays, you need to do it with a smile.