John Updike is always fun. And one of my former students, Tom Pynchon. And Harold Bloom, another former student.

There isn't any way for the people of Nicaragua to find out what's going on in Nicaragua.

I consider myself a bassist first.

Like all forms of collective security, multilateral sanctions require a unanimity rarely achieved in international politics.

We used to have more references to things that we pulled out because they almost felt like they were trying too hard to allude to something.

We are human, and nothing is more interesting to us than humanity.

If you are in a bad relationship with anyone else, it is because you are in a bad relationship with yourself.

It's amazing how, age after age, in country after country, and in all languages, Shakespeare emerges as incomparable.

I try to push ideas away, and the ones that will not leave me alone are the ones that ultimately end up happening.

Mystery is more important than knowledge.

The theories of the major philosophers of the 18th century secular enlightenment were biblical and theological in spite of themselves.

Each tear being shed holds a thousand pounds of truth.

Let's not become too busy to keep in touch with those who really matter most and need us. Life's short but let's make an indelible purposeful and powerful impact with it

And I think I'm an adrenaline junkie, and there's nothing that will spike your adrenaline more than sitting in a theater and listen to an audience react to something you've written.

I'm not even supposed to be here today.

You know. I don't think I'm gonna be Jewish for very long.

Life is a continuous exercise in creative problem solving.

For as spiritual as some people think my books are, I've never really dealt with religious things.

I'm always looking for the next major hurdle and doing something that the world has never seen.

Hypocrites are those who apply to others the standards that they refuse to accept for themselves.

The flow of blessings in our life is directly related to our passing blessings along to someone else.