There's just so many great stories in the past that you can know a little bit about, but you can't know it all, and that's where imagination can work.

To know a man's library is, in some measure, to know a man's mind.

A book is more than the sum of its materials. It is an artifact of the human mind and hand.

There are always a few who stand up in times of communal madness and have the courage to say that what unites us is greater than what divides us.

She was like a butterfly, full of color and vibrancy when she chose to open her wings, yet hardly visible when she closed them.

I'm a praying atheist. When I hear an ambulance siren, I ask for a blessing for those people in trouble, knowing that no one's listening. I think it's just a habit of mindfulness.

The brave man, the real hero, quakes with terror, sweats, feels his very bowels betray him, and in spite of this moves forward to do the act he dreads.

It is human nature to imagine, to put yourself in another's shoes. The past may be another country. But the only passport required is empathy.

Book burnings. Always the forerunners. Heralds of the stake, the ovens, the mass graves.

Who is the brave man--he who feels no fear? If so, then bravery is but a polite term for a mind devoid of rationality and imagination.

You go on. You set one foot in front of the other, and if a thin voice cries out, somewhere behind you, you pretend not to hear, and keep going.

The entire Universe will conspire to satiate our desire of what we put out there... as long as that desire was created in the womb of compassion

My mother went to university, my father didn't. But they are very educated, very wise people. My father went to the military, so he's worldly.

There's somewhat of a real fascination with American bands and American mythology in London.

Long, long before I became a filmmaker I was talking to killers. Filmmaking was an after thought.

As many have noted, the peril for authors is that our work space is too easily our play space.

I was stationed in Norfolk, Virginia, for a while, about which the less said the better, and then I was in the Mediterranean, about which the more said the better.

I've burned my own house down, the torch is in my hand.Now I'll burn down the house of anyone who wants to follow me.

I cannot really be responsible for other people's thought processes.

Without the capacity to provide its own information, the mind drifts into randomness.

We have to face the reality of climate change. It is arguably the biggest threat we are facing today.