Religion has been an important part of my understanding, my inquiry into what it means to be human.

The secret of a happy life is respect. Respect for yourself and respect for others.

I see the American experience as being defined by the immigrant paradigm of rupture and renewal: rupture with the old world, the old ways, and renewal of the self in a bright but difficult New World.

If you want to really deeply touch the viewer or the reader, the theater might be the most powerful way to do it.

Here's the problem: we are living in a time when the act of reading is changing. The nature of a reader's attention is changing. The capacity for deep literary engagement is changing.

I think that literary forms are losing their capacity to connect people to issues, to the experiences that feel most meaningful to them.

I don't have an ideal reader. I'm trying to reach something simple and, I believe, universal, in every single person.

I don't know what it's like to be Jewish, but I suspect there is some aspect of that: being Jewish is the thing that bonds you as opposed to being Jewish from Poland, or Jewish from Hungary.

I have no interest in problematizing things. So what I am writing to is that simple sense of being human in myself.

I don't want to test that simple sense of being human. I don't want to transform it.

The Quran is many different things, and we also have to see the Quran almost as a secondary source commenting on the Old Testament.

To seek the praise of men as our motivation is to abandon truly great things, for more often than not truly great things elicit the ire of men far more than they garner their praises.

There are times when a lover longs to be also a father and a brother: he is jealous of the years he hasn't shared.

We need a new definition of malnutrition. Malnutrition means under- and over-nutrition. Malnutrition means emaciated and obese.

I’m trying my best to keep up with all this new technology and I surround myself with all these wonderful people that are in the know and kind of help me out with all that.

No wonder of it: sheer plod makes plough down sillion Shine, and blue-bleak embers, ah my dear, Fall, gall themselves, and gash gold-vermilion.

I want people to come see my films and enjoy them but at the end of the day you can't control what people think.

I don't want my writing to be recognized.

I guess it has to be healthy, you have to be honest with yourself and I think that's when ego is okay.

We have not the love of greatness, but the love of the love of greatness.

I mean, I like nice girls, and I like people who are generous.