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

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.

In my early 30s, I started to realise I was avoiding something on a personal level, but also as a writer. I was in denial about who I was, and was trying to be someone who I was not.

His eyes said what I cannot see.

Life is unfair, but that's no reason to give up on it

The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.

Exercise is life in motion. MOVE to LIVE!

I love my family, my wife, my kids, my dogs, my home, my life. I am a very happy and contented man.

I paint the way some people write their autobiography. The paintings, finished or not, are the pages of my journal, and as such they are valid.

It was in making education not only common to all, but in some sense compulsory on all, that the destiny of the free republics of America was practically settled.

I require something so horrifically alcoholic that it makes livers tremble with fear and run for their lives when its name is uttered.

I'm moderately optimistic. We Americans are an enormous country with more than 300 million people so there's reason for optimism.

Do you know how cruel your God can be, David. How fantastically cruel?...Sometimes he makes us live.