“The relationship between science and the humanities is two-way. Science changes our view of the world and our place in it. In the other direction, the humanities provide the store of ideas and images and language available to us in understanding the world.”

I still will sit down at the piano and play when I am wrestling with something emotionally or just want to move into the musical world.

I appreciate the idea of the individual person battling the society – which is true in all his books.

While people brood, time skips ahead without looking back.

Children grow rapidly, forget the centuries-long embrace from their parents, which to them lasted but seconds. Children become adults, live far from their parents, live their own houses, learn ways of their own, suffer pain, grow old.

Each person knows that somewhere is recorded the moment she was born, the moment she took her first step, the moment of her first passion, the moment she said goodbye to her parents.

A life is a moment in season. A life is one snowfall. A life is one autumn day. A life is the delicate, rapid edge of a closing door’s shadow. A life is a brief movement of arms and of legs.

The loved one will never take his arms from where they are now, will never give back the bracelet of memories, will never journey afar from his lover, will never place himself in danger of self-sacrifice.

And of course, that makes it frightening to start a new book because you can’t really depend upon what you’ve done with previous books.

When the first mechanical clocks were invented, marking off time in crisp, regular intervals, it must have surprised people to discover that time flowed outside their own mental and physiological processes.

Unfortunately, public debates do not have much room for subtlety. The audience wants a quick thrust at your opponent, not a slow and convoluted series of moves.

Our species has advanced from Stone Age to Industrial Revolution to Digital Emptiness. We’ve become weightless, in the bad sense of the word.

And at the place where time stands still, one sees lovers kissing in the shadows of buildings, in a frozen embrace that will never let go.

I think all tragedies are best told with some humor. You have to relieve the darkness to let the reader get through it. Also, that life has happiness and sadness mixed together.

We try to impose order, both in our minds and in our conceptions of external reality.

it is sometimes hard to tell what is real. We often invent what isn’t there. Or ignore what is.

I wouldn’t overall say that “The Diagnosis” is a funny book. I would say that it has comic moments. It’s a modern tragedy.

History is a race between education and catastrophe.

I’m fed up with the idiots… the ever-widening gap between people who know how to make movies and the people who green-light the movies.

Mankind is poised midway between the gods and the beasts.

Human history becomes more and more a race between education and catastrophe.

I don’t want people to think I’m not happy when we win – I am. But there’s a difference between being happy for the feeling of accomplishing something and being overjoyed and feeling, ‘This is it – we conquered the world.’ We didn’t. We just won a game.

My life, at least, is divided between writing and performing and mixtures of the two.

A novel is balanced between a few true impressions and the multitude of false ones that make up most of what we call life.

There’s one major difference between James Bond and me. He is able to sort out problems!