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.

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.

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.

Don’t believe those who say, ‘you can’t’. You can make it in life.You can realise all your dreams.

Always look deep into your soul for the greatest strength.

Put no limit to your thinking or you can never go far and never find the truth!

The more mistakes, the better the story afterwards. Especially if there's a happy ending.

Faith is irrational, which is why those who exercise it are rewarded irrationally.

Loyalty is something you should always hold sacred in your heart.

Thank Fate for foes! I hold mine dear As valued friends. He cannot know The zest of life who runneth here His earthly race without a foe.

The copyeditor I drew was a brachycephalic, web-footed cretin who should have been in an institution learning how to make brooms.

An apple a day keeps anyone away, if you throw it hard enough.