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

I certainly believe there are forces bigger than ourselves, and that we should be searching, individually, for meaning in our lives. But I don’t believe there’s a supreme being, an intelligence that created everything.

Science is an intellectual journey, and to me, it’s not the destination.

Some make light of decisions, arguing that all possible decisions will occur. In such a world, how could one be responsible for his actions?

We live in a highly polarized society. We need to try to understand each other in respectful ways.

We often do not see what we do not expect to see.

The target of power is more interesting than its quantity.

Scientists will forever have to live with the fact that their product is, in the end, impersonal.

Is anything so pure? Or is love, by its nature, a reciprocity, like oceans and clouds, an evaporating of seawater and a replenishing of rain?

We don’t have the time, literally, to think during the day. To listen to ourselves think. To think about where we are going, who we are, what’s important.

Another strand of my writing is the importance of the idea.

We walk from room to room, look into the room that is lit, the present moment, then walk on. We do not know the rooms ahead, but we know we cannot change them. We are spectators of our lives.

Everyone shares the same fate.

Their predictions become postdictions- Their equations become justifications, their logic, illogic.

And beyond any particular clock, a vast scaffold of time, stretching across the universe, lays down the law of time equally for all.

You say, “Something important really happened here. I really had hold of something I was visited by the muse.” And that’s enough to make you continue the months and years to finish the whole book.

All writers have roots they draw from – travel, work, family. My roots are in science and it is fertile ground for fiction.

I’ve never really felt good at the parties, but I have enough friends now that I feel social, I used to feel very antisocial, but I think the theater helps.

The ideas always have to be in service of the story. And that’s what Scott and the writers did – they weren’t trying to beat you over the head with an idea; they had a story they wanted to tell, and they had ideas

We’re always looking for the backbone, the central idea, and once you have that you know everything can circle around it.

If we want a better original idea, we must generate our own before we screen others’ suggestions.

The urge to create a fictional narrative is a mysterious one, and when an idea comes, the writer’s sense of what a story wants to be is only vaguely visible through the penumbra of inspiration.

The one word you should forget when you start a new project is the word ‘I’ – you need to replace that word ‘I’ with the idea of ‘everybody else.

Making an idea into an emotion.

Both men have an authoritarian idea of government; democracy is merely a façade.