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.

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.

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.

But time given to wishing for what can't be is not only spent, but wasted, and for all that we waste we shall be accountable.

It is their attachment to us rather than their independence from us that we value in our pets.

Magic lies in between things, between the day and the night, between yellow and blue, between any two things.

What is history but a fable agreed upon?

While I am a convinced pacifist there are circumstances in which I believe the use of force is appropriate - namely, in the face of an enemy unconditionally bent on destroying me and my people.

It wasn't just one journalist getting it wrong, everybody was getting it wrong.

I'm not wasting my time with any more non-straight-talking candidates.

The pleasure of eating something because it is expensive has absolutely nothing to do with the taste of good cuisine.

This is a world of process, not a world of things.

In the greater part of humankind there resides an instinct for survival. It is this which can clutch at straws and effect a rescue from them. It is this which can, now and then, outwit fate.