“I have always loved magic realism as a form of writing.”

Writers read essays and serious thinkers and serious readers… that is a small population.

Order is the law of nature, the universal trend, the cosmic direction. If time is an arrow, that arrow points toward order.

There are important differences which should be preserved, and in trying to do away with those differences we would lose something the same way as if we tried to make all religions one religion or all races one race.

It is true that the arts at MIT don’t have the same amount of funding or same status as the sciences or engineering.

Sadness is no more than a bit of acid transfixed in the cerebellum.

In this world, there are two times. There is mechanical time and there is body time.

If you over-plot your book you strangle your characters. Your characters have to have enough freedom and life to be able to surprise you.

Thoughts are no more than electrical surges in the brain.

I’ve taken a philosophical position on e-mail. Although I think it’s a wonderful communication technology, and it has a lot of good uses, it is abused quite a lot.

I was in New York and had lunch with Oliver Sachs and compared notes with him – he is someone I really like.

I reached for some principle that had been subconscious in me and lifted it into consciousness.

Writers are a loosely knit community – community is an overstated word. Writers don’t see each other very much.

I think Joe Leiberman has been one of the leaders of the country… people have such a broad respect for him as a moral force.

Music is, of course, a universal emotional experience, cutting across cultures and languages. I studied piano for ten years as a child and consider that experience one of the most valuable in my life.

Time is the clarity for seeing right and wrong.

All beliefs not in such contradiction may be considered as faith. Whether faith in a particular belief is beneficial or not is another matter.

Art comes out of art; it begins with imitation, often in the form of parody, and it’s in the process of imitating the voice of others that one comes to learn the sound of one’s own.

To play Trivial Pursuit with a life like mine could be said to be a form of homeopathy.

What I’ve learned about teaching is to refer back to the root of that word, which is educo, which means “to pull from.

I would box them into a corner with a badly formed question, and they didn’t know how to get out of it. Now, I let them take me through it step by step, and I listen.

There cannot be any communication except through form. If there is no form, you cannot create emotion in the spectator.

Each man is contained and constrained, on entering social life, to fit his own life in, just as he fits his words and thoughts into a language that was formed without and before him and which is impervious to his power.

Since then [1958 Coup in Iraq], reality started to take another form in my mind. Hence, I was aware of deception of our senses.

I’d like to think our love does return to us reincarnated in different human forms. That people might be temporary, but love is permanent and it just changes form.