“The relationship between science and the humanities is two-way. Science changes our view of the world and our place in it. In the other direction, the humanities provide the store of ideas and images and language available to us in understanding the world.”

The tragedy of this world is that everyone is alone. For a life in the past cannot be shared with the present. Each person who gets stuck in time gets stuck alone.

As a scientist, I don’t believe science will ever discover whether God exists. Nor do I believe religion will ever prove it.

Not only will two different readers get something different but so will a single reader at different points in his life.

If you told a story that was all darkness, it wouldn’t be real.

And if we can’t unplug from that machine, eventually we’re going to become mindless.

The tragedy of this world is that no one is happy, whether stuck in a time of pain or joy.

Illuminated by only the most feeble red light, for light is diminished to almost nothing at the center of time, its vibrations slowed to echoes in vast canyons, its intensity reduced to the faint glow of fireflies.

Is it possible for a person to love without wanting love back? Is anything so pure? Or is love, by its nature, a reciprocity, like oceans and clouds, an evaporating of seawater and a replenishing by rain?

We’ve lost our way, we have lost our centeredness.

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.

Until we have a legitimate labor market between Mexico and the United States, people will attempt to come here to work.

Where lies the line between sorcery and science? It is only a matter of terminology, my friend.

How we navigate between false agreement and polarization is the kind of mastery that collective wisdom represents.

There is little difference technically between a complicated, confusing program and a simple, fun, and powerful product.

Some local boys come in and there is a bit of chat between them and the fish-fryer about whether the kestrel under the counter is for sale.

Imagine that. Per person. This means that if the time scale is diminished in proportion to that of space it would be quite possible for the whole story of Greece and Rome to be played out between farts.

For at least the past 65 years, liberalism has been nothing if not an attempt to strike a balance between the needs of the community and the needs of individuals, between the need for freedom and the need for order.

The difference between listening and pretending to listen, I discovered, is enormous. One is fluid, the other is rigid. One is alive, the other is stuffed.