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

Human beings consider themselves satisfied only compared to some other condition.

A writer is someone who has a one-man tent in the desert and occasionally he sees the footprint of an other writer – in the form of a review or something.

I picked such seemingly disparate essays, I thought it was important to say what was the guiding principle in the selection rather than focus on any one essay.

Some say it is best not to go near the center of time.

That someone else was speaking the words to me and I was just writing them down. It was a very strange experience. That can happen with a short book. I don’t think it could happen with a long book.

A world in which time is absolute is a world of consolation. For while the movements of people are unpredictable, the movement of time is predictable.

Although technology is proceeding at a dizzying pace, I believe that the human mind will always have control of itself.

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?

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

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.

Darkness is where we begin and where we end.

Only as we mature does affection begin to depend on achievement.

Work finally begins when the fear of doing nothing exceeds the fear of doing it badly.

I`m very cautious about what appears to be things put in place that will begin to roll back some of the progress that I believe we`ve made.

I was just thrilled to get the gig to begin with. Ten years later to still have it is not only thrilling but also somewhat of a puzzlement.

When I start on a film I always have a number of ideas about my project. Then one of them begins to germinate, to sprout, and it is this, which I take and work with.

Let me begin by saying not only you can’t have democracy with $75 million. You can’t even have it with $750 billion.

I was president then. I’m not president now. When I said it, this would be a sign of goodwill to begin the talks.