If you cannot live without justification, you cannot live; period. And the path towards it is the path of language.

Take Bach or Schubert: Their music was dedicated to God but filled and shaped their worldly lives. If you are a committed atheist, you lean back and miss all the richness of that history.

You cannot spend two thousand years trying to understand God and then simply abandon the question and declare that we’re not interested in it anymore.

I believe that the most important condition for faith is sensitivity to beauty.

It is only true love when you have no choice. Love is the most highly valued disease that is identified by the symptom of You-can´t-help-it.

As an atheist, you cannot fully make sense of the music, you have no explanation for the perennial motion and rhythm.

Those who use language and have nothing but language to express themselves live in a cage that cannot feel comfortable.

Everything direct is positive, everything indirect is negative.

People who don't pay attention to the question of justification are often rather uninteresting, in my opinion. I am most fascinated by characters who struggle with the demands of justification.

Once you have awakened to the question of faith, you cannot simply return to your everyday agenda like a committed atheist could. You cannot retreat to the comforts of atheism.

You cannot simply discard God like a box that has been emptied.

Believe in yourself. You believe because you have faith. And because you have faith, you have courage to do.

I took only twice a time-out, once, when I was hurt, and a second time, when I much felt I was exhausted out of personal reasons.

If we can continue to win, hopefully they can falter a little down the stretch.

I have a rotten habit of picturing the bedroom scenes of my friends.

People always say to me, "What if it doesn't work?" If it doesn't work, we redouble our effort. We're not going to cry like a bunch of babies. We're going to redouble our effort.

New York is a nice place." "If you like concrete, crowds, and that claustrophobic, closed-in feeling.

Would you not like to try all sorts of lives - one is so very small - but that is the satisfaction of writing - one can impersonate so many people.

Behave simply and hold on to purity.

One puts on black robes to scare the hell out of white people, while the other puts on white robes to scare the hell out of blacks.

Slum kids die slowly, their lives eroded at so languid a pace that even they would have trouble tracing the disintegration. To the children of war death explodes like a car bomb.