“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.”

Like the air we breathe or like the passage of time, is central to our existence as intelligent beings.

In the coffee houses, in the government buildings, in boats of Lake Geneva, people look at their watches and take refuge in time.

In this acausal world, scientists are helpless.

When I used to play golf. It’s a terrible miserable game. It’s incredibly frustrating. In 18 holes you make 150 horrible shots off in the woods, in the water…

In fiction writing, I would say there are several different strands that have been woven through my own writing, and each influenced by a different group of writers.

The second squirms and wriggles like a bluefish in a bay. The first is unyielding, predetermined. The second makes up its mind as it goes along.

In this world, artists are joyous. Unpredictability is the life of their paintings, their music, their novels. They delight in events not forecasted, happenings without explanation, retrospective.

In this world, there are two times. There is mechanical time and there is body time.” “They do not keep clocks in their houses. Instead, they listen to their heartbeats. They feel the rhythms of their moods and desires.”

So it’s really about two and a half months that I’ll feel like I can recover some silence in my life…which is so hard to find.

There is a cultural diversity that’s very valuable, and it’s valuable to have different ways of looking at the world.

To that end, I believe that we should make room for both spiritual atheists and thinking believers.

And if the present has little effect on the future, present actions need not be weighed for their consequence.

As I understand it, a universe is a … well, a totality. A universe is everything that is, as far as the inside of the thing.

Each time is true, but the truths are not the same.

For my students who are trying to learn the craft of writing in a writing class – contemporary literature is what’s most useful.

If a person holds no ambitions in this world, he suffers unknowingly.

Absent parents aren’t abusive per se. They’re neglectful. They love in a very imperfect way. There are parents like that, and they do love their daughters and sons, but they’re not parents in the way that we might think of it.

Being a founder is like being a parent. You always stay involved.

My parents told me I must get married. I was seen as a failure if I didn’t do it.

I remove a lot of the pressure from myself by saying I’m not competing with my parents. They are the persons who taught me my ideology. They actively practiced what they preached. They’re the exemplars and the role models. So how does one compete with a mentor?

My own parents were touchy-feely.

My massive motivation in life is to make parents proud. But even that has to stop at a point.

I recently watched that Lucie Arnaz-produced documentary [Lucy and Desi: A Home Movie, 1992] about her parents [Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz], and I saw so much of my own childhood there.

My parents were secular. I am an atheist.