For me, study is a divine and daily imperative, and I study a page of Talmud daily so that I am not only teaching. My teaching is constantly being fed by my learning.

I have a principle I often invoke in class: comfortable people don't grow. Good teachers need to engage in the paradox of making students feel comfortable and uncomfortable in equal measure.

If we are indeed created in God's image, then we, too, must create and then we, too, must rest.

For some reason, I write about crash-landed spaceships quite a lot and my wife is sick of hearing of hearing my ideas for new tales about them.

I love lighting Shabbat candles at the onset of Shabbat. It helps me create a strong and firm demarcation of time.

If our writing is worth anything at all, then we have to put ourselves into it.

That's true of every form of literature - each writer brings new things to it because each of us is an individual.

I love space opera, and I believe that every sub-genre has potential no matter how old it is.

In order to survive, the human race must defend itself.

I love going to synagogue on Friday night and being swept in the melodies. Everyone seems more friendly and unburdened by the week and ready to be taken elsewhere.

I took to religion at about age 12; it was very hard for me to be Sabbath observant as a kid in a home which was not Sabbath observant. I think my parents thought the whole Jewish thing was a phase.

There will come a time of fire and night, when enemies rise and empires fall, when the stars themselves begin to die.

It means, Doug Swieteck, that in this class, you are not your brother.

I am amazed that there are still nights when I sleep well.

I know that I wasn't bred to be an Olympian. I didn't start running until high school, and I just stumbled upon to.

...and she said we all had to find God inside ourselves, in the things we loved most.

If you really thought about who you are, who God is, and how much thanks you owe Him, you would want to go to Mass. The Mass would become the source and center of your spiritual life.

I have never seen such a perfectly formed animal. Beautiful and graceful like a gazelle, he burned hot and wild with the deserts of Egypt in his soul.

I certainly believe you can write a narrative lyric or a lyrical narrative - why not a nyric or a larrative?

He smelled cold water and cold intrepid green. Those early flowers smelled like cold water. Their fragrance was not the still perfume of high summer; it was the smell of cold, raw green.

If somebody don't like something that I do, that's his or her prerogative. Just like it's mine.