I don't feel that as an artist my job is to offer PR propaganda, whether for the good or for the bad.

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.

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.

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.

Dylan Jerome, " the lawyer admits, "wanted to sue God for not caring enough about him.

Every family is a ghost story.

To write a good love letter you ought to begin without knowing what you mean to say and to finish without knowing what you have written.

Philosophy gets its ugly head into everything, but I don't think we live philosophy anymore. It's done.

Politics is a place of humble hopes and strangely modest requirements, where all are good who are not criminal and all are wise who are not ridiculously otherwise.

The hunger of the eye is not to be despised; and they are to be pitied who have starvation of the eye.

I don't keep up on a lot of the business trends.

In Russia I felt for the first time like a full human being. No color prejudice like in Mississippi, no color prejudice like in Washington. It was the first time I felt like a human being.

Not at all, I wanted to go into medicine. I took science in college. But my dad was a Producer - Director in Kannada films, and someone saw me, and one thing led to another.

The bigger you build the bonfire, the more darkness is revealed.