“If you over-plot your book you strangle your characters. Your characters have to have enough freedom and life to be able to surprise you.”

A person who cannot imagine the future is a person who cannot contemplate the results of his actions. Some are thus paralyzed into inaction.

Human beings consider themselves satisfied only compared to some other condition.

A writer is someone who has a one-man tent in the desert and occasionally he sees the footprint of an other writer – in the form of a review or something.

I picked such seemingly disparate essays, I thought it was important to say what was the guiding principle in the selection rather than focus on any one essay.

Some say it is best not to go near the center of time.

That someone else was speaking the words to me and I was just writing them down. It was a very strange experience. That can happen with a short book. I don’t think it could happen with a long book.

A world in which time is absolute is a world of consolation. For while the movements of people are unpredictable, the movement of time is predictable.

Although technology is proceeding at a dizzying pace, I believe that the human mind will always have control of itself.

I think it is always a long shot getting a book made into a film.

It’s the Platonic philosophy in The Republic that philosophers should lead the country.

As human beings, don’t we need questions without answers as well as questions with answers, questions that we might someday answer and questions that we can never answer?

Where are the one billion people who lived and breathed in the year 1800, only two short centuries ago?

The mother and father osprey stay together. It’s a monogamous relationship. And every summer they raise a new brood of children.

As long as God does not intervene in the contemporary universe in such a way as to violate physical laws, science has no way of knowing whether God exists or not.

The tragedy of this world is that everyone is alone. For a life in the past cannot be shared with the present.

If I were not a writer, I would spend more time doing the things that I am already doing, which include doing research in physics, teaching, and running a nonprofit organization with a mission to empower women in Cambodia.

I don’t know what DVD commentaries are about. I’d like to strangle the person who came up with that concept.

She might have liked to try to strangle him with those slender fingers of hers, but she wanted to make a job of it and this great patience with which she waited for her claws to grow was in itself a form of enjoyment.

Every dictatorship has ultimately strangled in the web of repression it wove for its people, making mistakes that could not be corrected because criticism was prohibited.