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

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

Sexual arousal is no more than a flow of chemicals to certain nerve endings.

It is a world of impulse. It is a world of sincerity.

I would bet most people don’t have thirty minutes in a day where they can just sit down and think. Or maybe they don’t have to be sitting, they can be walking.

It’s not necessarily a large number of people that affect the culture. You don’t count the number of influential voices, you weigh them. A hundred people can affect the culture.

The Book of Telling tells of a woman’s journey to uncover the secret life of her father and to find herself in the process.

If a person holds ambitions, he suffers knowingly, but very slowly.

That has been the great achievement of our age: to so thoroughly flood the planet with megabits that every image and fact has become a digitized disembodied nothingness. With magnificent determination,

The first is as rigid and metallic as a massive pendulum of iron that swings back and forth, back and forth, back and forth.

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.

To the point that I have to be careful that they don’t take over.

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

Authenticity and sincerity were the most important unifying principles of all these apparently different essays.

In a world without future, each parting of friends is a death. In a world without future, each loneliness is final.

The book is finished by the reader. A good novel should invite the reader in and let the reader participate in the creative experience and bring their own life experiences to it, interpret with their own individual life experiences.

Unconditional love. That’s what he wants to give her and what he wants from her. People should give without wanting anything in return.

For an understanding that our immediate actions have long-term consequences, and for an appreciation that there are different ways of knowing and understanding situations.

Trust and confidence that have been built is not something that should be abandoned without great consideration for the potentially grave consequences to the United States.

And the least capable of understanding the consequences of actions.

The glorious thing for you always has consequences for others.

They obviously collected a lot of votes, but these monies could not solve the structural problems that these people face. But the only result, the only consequence, was that a big sum from the budget was wasted this way.

The world’s problems are, by and large, human problems-the unavoidable consequence of egoic sleepwalking. If we care to look, all the signs are present to suggest that we are not only sleepwalking, but at times borderline insane as well.

You are free to choose but you are not free to choose the consequences of that choice.

You are free to choose. You are not free not to choose. No choice is a choice.