I think that literary forms are losing their capacity to connect people to issues, to the experiences that feel most meaningful to them.

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 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.

We are given to the great, for great purpose, to great ends. We are given to the grave, for grave purposes, to grave ends.

Positive thought + positive action = positive results.

My dad is a motorcycle guy, not some Hollywood dude.

I write a lot of songs people don't hear. I really just enjoy the process. I finish 'em all. I don't think there's a whole lot of difference between the bad ones and the good ones.

We have no sociology of architecture. Architects are unaccustomed to social analysis and mistrust it; sociologists have fatter fish to fry.

Just because i know how to change a guys oil doesn't mean i want to spend the rest of my life on my back, staring up his undercarriage.

There is no limitation other than what you think.

The wealth that increases by giving, That wealth is knowledge and is supreme of all possessions.

At twenty I tried to die And get back, back, back to you. I thought even the bones would do.

All wishes, whatever their apparent content, have the same and unvarying meaning: "I refuse to be what I am."