“Franz Kafka is an idea person. His books begin and end in ideas. Ideas have always been important to me in my writing.”

I think once we stop asking questions like “what is the age of the universe,” or “how are the instructions of DNA carried out on a microscopic level,” once we stop asking questions like that, we’re dead.

I think what gets you through a small writing project, is just one burst of inspiration.

Despite our strongly felt kinship and oneness with nature, all the evidence suggests that nature doesn’t care one whit about us.

Whenever Obama uses subtleties in discussing a complex issue, he gets creamed.

I’m still happy with the way Einstein’s Dreams came out. That book came out of a single inspiration. I really felt like I was not creating the words, that I was hearing the words.

In a world of fixed future, life is an infinite corridor of rooms, one room lit at each moment, the next room dark but prepared.

He hopes that she loves him in return. Is it possible for a person to love without wanting love back?

You’ve made something grand, but it will be grander if it has feeling and beauty and harmony.

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?

I let him know a hurt had been mended in a way that he couldn’t have known, and for that alone there would always be a piece of me indebted to him.

Never forget that we were enslaved in this country longer than we have been free.

Hitting the bottle again, ever than I’ve drunker been. Or is it drunker than I’ve ever been?

He had lived and acted on the assumption that he was alone, and now he saw that he had not been. What he had done made others suffer.

Elizabeth. Only the strongest people have the pluck to change their minds, and say so, if they see they have been wrong in their ideas.

For the moment all discipline seems painful rather than pleasant; later it yields the peaceful fruit of righteousness to those who have been trained by it.

I believe that many politicians think this has been the way it has always been, so what’s the problem?

A feeling of violation swayed inside me, making me feel as if id been shoved off a high platform without warning. I was falling, and i feared the sensation far more than hitting bottom. There was no end; just a constantsense of gravity having its way with me.