The work that lasts over time is the work which still speaks to us when all contemporary interest in that work is extinct.

I like to look at how people work together when they are put into stressful situations, when life stops being cozy.

Art can make a difference because it pulls people up short. It says, don't accept things for their face value; you don't have to go along with any of this; you can think for yourself.

I don't know how to answer. I know what I think, but words in the head are like voices underwater. They are distorted.

I felt like a seed in a pomegranate. Some say that the pomegranate was the real apple of Eve, fruit of the womb, I would eat my way into perdition to taste you.

Happiness is a specific. Misery is a generalization. People usually know exactly why they are happy. They very rarely know why they are miserable.

Quest is at the heart of what I do-the holy grail, and the terror that you'll never find it, seemed a perfect metaphor for life.

I find pieces of myself everywhere, and I cut myself handling them.

Do you fall in love often?" Yes often. With a view, with a book, with a dog, a cat, with numbers, with friends, with complete strangers, with nothing at all.

I would eat my way into perdition to taste you.

Life cannot be calculated. That's the big mistake our civilization made. We never accepted that randomness is not a mistake in the equation -- it is part of the equation.

Finding the calmness or serenity in oneself effectively diffuses the judgments of others

What an electric thrill it sends up and down the spine, how it sets the heart racing: A Royal Romance! A Royal Wedding! The pomp and the pageantry!

Without foundation, there can be no fashion.

I love librarians more than any other people in the world. When I was an immigrant kid, they’ve made me feel like a human being and they gave me books that taught me English.

For ever so our thoughtful hearts repeatOn fields of triumph dirges of defeat;And still we turn on gala-days to treadAmong the rustling memories of the dead.

The history of race relations in America is very different than something like the Holocaust.

I come from pioneer stock, developers of the West, people who went out into the wilderness and set up home with nothing but a pair of oxen.

You've come to know the fortunate and the inauspicious stars, but you don't know whether you yourself are fortunate or lucky.

I'm a lazy writer. My idea of heaven is not writing. On the other hand, I'm obviously compulsive about it.

If you believe in the project, you have to support it.