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

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?

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.

Time is visible in all places. Clock towers, wristwatches, church bells divide years into months, months into days, days into hours, hours into seconds, each increment of time marching after the other in perfect succession.

I consider myself a spiritual atheist.

In a world without future, each moment is the end of the world.

The history of science can be viewed as the recasting of phenomena that were once thought to be accidents as phenomena that can be understood in terms of fundamental causes and principles.

The argument goes that if the past has uncertain effect on the present, there is no need to dwell on the past.

For it is only habit and memory that dulls the physical passion. Without memory, each night is the first night, each morning is the first morning, each kiss and touch are the first.

I’m humbled and enormously grateful to be connected to [Franz] Kafka in a any way. He is one of the writers I admire. I think he has been a big influence on me.

There are the alpha waves in the brain; another clock is the heart. And all the while tick the mysterious, ruthless clocks that regulate aging.

Novels aren’t pedagogical instruments, or instructions in law or physics or any other discipline.

Loneliness will sit over our roofs with brooding wings.

A feeling of having been injured, on which his mind can brood from hour to hour, allowing him to plead his own cause in his own court, within his own heart, and always to plead it successfully.

For while the movements of people are unpredictable, the movement of time is predictable. While people can be doubted, time cannot be doubted. While people brood, time skips ahead without looking back.

While people can be doubted, time cannot be doubted. While people brood, time skips ahead without looking back.

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.