There is another consequence of any belief in a single god, and that is that it is a very good excuse for people to behave very badly.

True education flowers at the point when delight falls in love with responsibility.

You cannot change what you are, only what you do.

That's the duty of the old, to be anxious on behalf of the young. And the duty of the young is to scorn the anxiety of the old.

After nourishment, shelter and companionship, stories are the thing we need most in the world.

One curious thing about growing up is that you don't only move forward in time; you move backwards as well, as pieces of your parents' and grandparents' lives come to you.

We don't need lists of rights and wrongs, tables of do's and don'ts: we need books, time, and silence. Thou shalt not is soon forgotten, but Once upon a time lasts forever.

I stopped believing there was a power of good and a power of evil that were outside us. And I came to believe that good and evil are names for what people do, not for what they are.

If you want something you can have it, but only if you want everything that goes with it, including all the hard work and the despair, and only if you're willing to risk failure.

Read like a butterfly, write like a bee.

Just finished 'Secrecy' - truly enthralling both as a love story and as a tale of suspense - but much more than both.

Self-identity is about content not the container that carry the identity, contextual value and not a solo island. It is about conception and not just a birth process.

In war the moral is to the material as three to one. Napoleon

While I can’t walk on water, I can certainly wobble on whisky.

Value your friendship. Value your relationships.

There is nothing wanting to make all rational and disinterested people in the world of one religion, but that they should talk together every day.

When you're in young love your pulse pounds, your palms sweat, and there are butterflies in your stomach. It's like diarrhea for your heart.

When you think about a composer you know like Wagner or Pier Boulez or something like that most of the issues a composer is working with are about discreet, notated music that someone else will play.

How feeble is all language to describe the horrors we inflict upon these wretches, whom we mason up in the cells of our prisons, and condemn to perpetual solitude in the very heart of our population.

Have you ever been homesick for someplace that doesn't actually exist anymore? Someplace that exists only in your mind?

I think people who do comedy tend to do it well, and to do it painfully and truthfully. So making the leap to drama is easier for them because everything they've done is from pain anyway.