I don't have an ideal reader. I'm trying to reach something simple and, I believe, universal, in every single person.

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 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.

You can't shake hands with a clenched fist.

Getting 'SNL' was pretty amazing, so just to be able to have an eight-year career there and be really happy with everything I did, it was pretty big.

The Celtic fans are very special and the club and players can be very proud of them. They are the best I have ever heard.

Oh now that's a blueprint for an impossibly rosy future

When the French nation gradually came into existence among the ruins of the Roman civilization in Gaul, a new language was at the same time slowly evolved.

The Eucharist, behold the Christian's treasure, his delight on earth. Since Jesus is in the Eucharist for him personally, his whole life ought to be drawn to it like a magnet to its center.

...chaos doesn't run the whole show.

The best approach is to dig out and eliminate problems where they were assumed not to exist.

The companies that make meaningful contributions while also listening to the voices of others are the ones that will genuinely engage their community, who will then go to work for them.

Once out of nature I shall never take My bodily form from any natural thing, But such a form as Grecian goldsmiths make