It's a sad commentary on our time - to use a phrase much favored by my late father - that people increasingly celebrate Christmas Day by going to the movies.

Make sure your message is clear, yet that you are faithful to its complexity.

What matters are those ordinary acts of kindness and of love, not vaulting ambition with its attendant hubris and smugness.

Throughout history the exemplary teacher has never been just an instructor in a subject; he is nearly always its living advertisement.

The world is a library of strange and wonderful books, and sometimes we just need to go prowling through the stacks.

I sometimes lie awake at night and try to imagine what would be the best period in history to spend one's seventy-odd years.

Science fiction is, after all, the art of extrapolation.

Order and surprise: these are two intertwined elements that make for any great library or collection.

Best selling authors are always worth listening to, even if you choose to ignore their advice.

I am shocked that we seemed to have learned nothing, absolutely nothing, from Vietnam.

I think the essence of [Kurt] Vonnegut's humanism lay in his emphasis on human kindness as, so to speak, our saving grace.

You want him praising the Lord in the morning, you put a smile on his face tonight.

Who didn’t exist at the convergence of a thousand thousand stories?

Sandals. The Sufi teacher Ghulam-Shah was asked what pattern he used in formulating his courses for disciples. He said: 'Barefoot until you can get sandals, sandals until you can manage boots.

In the struggle for life, a taste for truth is a luxury--or else a disability.

Only those who dare truly live.

If you're poor and you do something stupid, you're nuts. If you're rich and do something stupid, you're eccentric.

I didn't start skiing until I was 50. My wife Lois taught me how to ski. I'm proficiently conservative.

The politics of courtiers resemble their shadows; they cringe and turn with the sun of the day.

Live your daily life in a way that you never lose yourself

Mo' money, mo' problems.