None of us is perfect, but the point of our writing is to try to become better, to learn something that we may not have already realized, about ourselves, about the world we inhabit.

As lovers of truth, we want to be close to it. Sometimes - evil thought, evil temptation - we want to be close to it by misleading others about its presence.

I'm pretty sure my dog, Pip, gets lonely when there is no one to be with him. But we humans can end up with a gnawing worry about that separation possibly becoming a permanent condition.

Of course, each of us has to write our own book, live our own life.

I worry that we don't currently have a democracy in the United States. Instead we have what [political philosopher] Sheldon Wolin has recently labeled a sort of inverted totalitarianism.

I look back on some of my early reviews of others, and realize to my chagrin that I've been as guilty as anybody else on that front.

It is an admonition to myself when I am reading other people's books. Writing a book is very difficult to do, even a bad one. I try to remember that when reading someone else's work.

We can never leave loneliness behind completely - it is part of what forms us.

At some point just about all of us experience loneliness. In a sense, it is what it means to be a sentient animal, to have an experience of separation from others.

Question 3: Why should a person study Sufism?Answer: Because he was created to study it

If the mind fits, shrink it.

An honest man is always a child.

Jazz to me is a living music. It's a music that since its beginning has expressed the feelings, the dreams, hopes, of the people.

Those things don't happen today. I feel sorry for the kids in the industry today. They have on sunglasses, eat caviar in jet planes, but they'll never know the true feeling that we did.

Thank you guys. Thank you for never giving up on me.

I invented 'It's a good thing' before you were even born.

The whole world must see that Israel must exist and has the right to exist, and is one of the great outposts of democracy in the world.

We are the safest large city in America, but any crime rate is too high.

If you're going to get in the ring and try to take the belt, you have to prepare to get hit.