I think we may very well, in many areas, get likelihood, but not certitude. We don't want certitude anyway, do we?

We are thrown back on the text, for the most part. Archaeology can give us background. It doesn't either confirm or disprove the Bible, but it may illuminate it.

My own interest is far more in the Hebrew Bible. My religion is more personally related to the Hebrew Bible than it is to the New Testament.

The Garden of Eden presents the same story: If you want to make yourself gods, you'll find you're akin to the animals.

If one attempts to achieve deity or to have the holy, he is thrown back; he is refused. His language is taken from him. He can no longer even communicate. That's the Tower of Babel.

Israel defined its God and its relation to that God in existential, relational terms. They did not, until quite late, approach the question of one God in an abstract philosophical way.

I prefer to have all of this apparatus - historical, literary, critical - and then, beyond initial innocence and naiveté, to try to achieve a new innocence, a new naiveté.

We want to live in ambiguity. This is the human condition.

There was certainly an old law code which stands behind the earliest form of Deuteronomy. Presumably that is what was lost.

With the Hebrew Bible, you're living in an austere world.

There are surely many legitimate approaches to Biblical literature, and I think that it depends very much on one's experience and temperament which way one deals primarily with Biblical material.

Things refuse to be mismanaged for long.

The fiery moments of passionate experience are the moments of wholeness and totality of the personality.

You can make up a quarrel, but it will always show where it was patched.

This days one must be careful to avoid awakening the pain of another.

I secretly liked acting, but I wanted to play football. It was an enormous dream.

When a paradox is widely believed, it is no longer recognized as a paradox.

Nay, what is worse, perhaps turn poet, which, they say, is an infectious and incurable distemper.

I was touching on the idea of the autonomous militaristic or autonomous law enforcement idea, but it wasn't the primary driving force.

You're always homesick.

Someone said to me, "Hey, what's it like kissing Marilyn Monroe?" I said, "It's like kissing Hitler. What are you doing asking me such a stupid question?"