The most reliable joy is to be out of doors, to be a creature among other creatures. I find it very restful.

Life from nonlife, like wine from water, has long been considered a miracle wrought by gods or God. Now it is seen to be the near-inevitable consequence of our thermal and chemical circumstances.

Reverence is the sense that there is something larger than the self, larger even than the human, to which one accords respect and awe and assent.

The Senegalese conservationist Baba Dioum can summarize: "In the end, we will conserve only what we love, we will love only what we understand, and we will understand only what we are taught."

We are embedded in the great evolutionary story of planet Earth, the spare, elegant process of mutation and selection and bricolage. And this means that we are anything but alone.

Human consensus does not generate reality. Were it able to do so, the Sun would have taken to orbiting the Earth some time ago.

When the responses elicited by the Epic of Evolution are gathered together several religious principles emerge that I can believe, serve as a framework for a global Ethos.

It is as we respond to the understandings and feelings inherent in . . . art that we acquire much of our truth, much of our nobility and grace, and much of our pleasure.

The greater the artist, the greater the doubt.

My mother born in Mexico, but was Lebanese in origin. She born 1902 the same year my father arrived to Mexico when he was 14 years old.

I feel that as much as I enjoy loafing, there is something higher for which to live.

American writers want to be not good but great; and so are neither.

When things are difficult, smile by faith. Don't wait until you feel better.

I'm a more skilled writer now, but after 23 books it's harder to be fresh and that's really important to me. I don't want to write the same thing over and over again.

Off camera, I am not so quiet, I have a fun time, relaxed.

I'm sure that blondes have more fun, but I think that as a brunette I might work more.

I'm shocked and surprised by people that are shocked and surprised that certain things in life are made up or not as true as you might believe them to be.

Theatre is a series of insurmountable obstacles on the road to imminent disaster.