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.

The secret of a happy life is respect. Respect for yourself and respect for others.

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.

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.

Potential has a shelf life.

Everything can always be better! To know this is a wit! But if you also know that everything can always be worse and that is wisdom! Wisdom is to see both the lights and the shadows!

The Heart of Fairyland is a story, " she said, and she felt so warm and light and full of rightness of it that she thought she might faint.

You see people walking down the street with ear buds on and looking at this or whatever, talking to themselves. So there's more and more opportunity to never be where we actually are and just be.

The universe must be full of voices, calling from star to star in a myriad tongues. One day we shall join that cosmic conversation.

Other than heaven, the only place where one's heart is completely safe from the dangers of love is hell.

He who seeks repentance for the past, should woo the angel virtue for the future.

A penalty is a cowardly way to score.

Listen, smile, agree, then do whatever you were going to do anyway.

Lechery, lechery; still, wars and lechery: nothing else holds fashion.