What matters to me is that one identifies one's genuine obsessions, one's genuine commitments, one's genuine appetites, one pursues them seriously and far.

No great deed, private or public, has ever been undertaken in a bliss of certainty.

The Internet is like closing time at a blue-collar bar in Boston. Everyone’s drunk and ugly and they’re going to pass out in a few minutes.

Incorruptibility by money is the old story... Now it's incorruptibility by media.

There are times when the power of language is not the power that is needed.

There are moral religious people and moral secular people, immoral religious people and immoral secular people.

A thoughtless citizen of a democracy is a delinquent citizen of a democracy.

American Jews, like Americans, have a very consumerist attitude toward their identity: they pick and choose the bits of this and that they like.

The velocity and volume on the Web are so great that nothing is forgotten and nothing is remembered.

I hear it said of somebody that he is leading a double life. I think to myself: Just two?

Use the new technologies for the old purposes.

Inner beauty, warm-heartedness and compassion, is what brings about peace of mind.

Sometimes talking to you is like talking to myself: pretty damned annoying.

The secrets in his brain were like some mesmerizing drug to me.

The first thing you have to learn when you go into the arts is to learn to cope with rejection. If you can’t, you’re dead

His sadness was almost palpable, like moisture in the air before it rains. Although this was Manchester, it was probably about to rain anyway.

A library is thought in cold storage.

Laws grind the poor and rich men rule the law.

We just became very good friends [with Dwight Eisenhower], we played golf, we played heart exhibitions. Then his doctor said he should not play golf anymore.

I've lived in California for half of my life. It's weird, everyone thinks of me as this guy who's from the South ... I'm really a Californian.

Our religion doesn't demand perfection but instead a manageable strive to better ourselves.