I'm very disturbed by violence against women when it is violence.

It's disturbing at my age to look at a young woman's destructive behaviour and hear the echoes of it, of one's own destructiveness in youth.

That's one of the things I hope that the book can do, is to restore some dignity to Joe Cinque.

The rain began again. It fell heavily, easily, with no meaning or intention but the fulfilment of its own nature, which was to fall and fall.

Writers seem to me to be people who need to retire from social life and do a lot of thinking about what's happened - almost to calm themselves.

I'm full of restlessness. Not lonely, exactly - my head is racing with ideas. But it is that old treacherous feeling that real life is happening somewhere else, and I'm left out.

But there are some wounds that can never be healed.

People demand a lot of the justice system and they demand things that it can't deliver.

I think writers are very anxious.

It's a terrific privilege to be able to see into somebody else's life.

I like poking my nose into other people's lives.

Words have weight.

a square is not just about light, air, proportion, and people. It must also give form to some shared notion of civic identity. [Michael Kimmelman, "Culture: Power of the Place"].

Those who make objectivity a religion are liars. they are scared of human pain. They dont want to be objective, it's a lie: they want to be objects, so as not to suffer.

Confidence, clarity and compassion are essential qualities of a teacher.

Spiritual partnership is the partnership between equals for the purpose of spiritual growth.

Men think epilepsy divine, merely because they do not understand it. We will one day understand what causes it, and then cease to call it divine. And so it is with everything in the universe.

...some people coddle their own afflictions the way others spoil small pedigreed dogs with cans of pate.

If Rosa Parks had taken a poll before she sat down in the bus in Montgomery, she'd still be standing.

The years go by. The time, it does fly. Every single second is a moment in time that passes. And it seems like nothing - but when you're looking back ... well, it amounts to everything.

Because so few people make an actual long term commitment to what they're building, the ones that do have a huge advantage.