““Then there are those who think their bodies don’t exist. They live by mechanical time. They rise at seven o’clock in the morning. They eat their lunch at noon and their supper at six. They arrive at their appointments on time, precisely by the clock.”

That has been the great achievement of our age: to so thoroughly flood the planet with megabits that every image and fact has become a digitized disembodied nothingness. With magnificent determination,

The first is as rigid and metallic as a massive pendulum of iron that swings back and forth, back and forth, back and forth.

I would do something and let it sit for three months… just brood about and decide I needed to slightly change something here or there. Or one character wasn’t quite right. But I think everybody goes through this.

To the point that I have to be careful that they don’t take over.

You can’t let your characters just be mouthpieces for your ideas. They have to live and breathe on their own.

Authenticity and sincerity were the most important unifying principles of all these apparently different essays.

In a world without future, each parting of friends is a death. In a world without future, each loneliness is final.

The book is finished by the reader. A good novel should invite the reader in and let the reader participate in the creative experience and bring their own life experiences to it, interpret with their own individual life experiences.

Unconditional love. That’s what he wants to give her and what he wants from her. People should give without wanting anything in return.

Writers read essays and serious thinkers and serious readers… that is a small population.

Order is the law of nature, the universal trend, the cosmic direction. If time is an arrow, that arrow points toward order.

There are important differences which should be preserved, and in trying to do away with those differences we would lose something the same way as if we tried to make all religions one religion or all races one race.

It is true that the arts at MIT don’t have the same amount of funding or same status as the sciences or engineering.

Sadness is no more than a bit of acid transfixed in the cerebellum.

In this world, there are two times. There is mechanical time and there is body time.

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.

The happiness of being envied is glamour. Being envied is a solitary form of reassurance. It depends precisely upon not sharing your experience with those who envy you.

The thing we look forward to often comes to pass, but never precisely in the way we have imagined to ourselves.

We have collectively witnessed a fundamental unexpected event, fundamental precisely because unexpected, not foreseen by anyone.

It is precisely because there is nothing within the One that all things are from it.

Emancipatory politics always consists in making seem possible precisely that which, from within the situation, is declared to be impossible.

It’s precisely the people who are considered the least ‘likely’ leaders who end up inspiring others the most.

I met a lot of the senior Taliban, and I asked them precisely [about Mullah Omar]. The most common answer was he is humble. And that was very true.

I believe every translation is a process in which something is lost in the original precisely so that something is gained in the new text.