“All of these things can occur with or without God. I do not believe in the existence of God, but I consider myself a spiritual person in the manner I have just described. I call myself a spiritual atheist. I would imagine that many people are spiritual atheists.”

I believe that we need to slow down.

Rather, each act is an island in time, to be judged on its own. … It is a world of impulse. It is a world of sincerity.

It’s a flow of chemicals and electrical currents, and it developed over millions of years in the process of evolution to aid in the procreation of the species.

Most people have learned to live in the moment.

I still will sit down at the piano and play when I am wrestling with something emotionally or just want to move into the musical world.

I appreciate the idea of the individual person battling the society – which is true in all his books.

While people brood, time skips ahead without looking back.

Children grow rapidly, forget the centuries-long embrace from their parents, which to them lasted but seconds. Children become adults, live far from their parents, live their own houses, learn ways of their own, suffer pain, grow old.

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.

A life is a moment in season. A life is one snowfall. A life is one autumn day. A life is the delicate, rapid edge of a closing door’s shadow. A life is a brief movement of arms and of legs.

The loved one will never take his arms from where they are now, will never give back the bracelet of memories, will never journey afar from his lover, will never place himself in danger of self-sacrifice.

And of course, that makes it frightening to start a new book because you can’t really depend upon what you’ve done with previous books.

When the first mechanical clocks were invented, marking off time in crisp, regular intervals, it must have surprised people to discover that time flowed outside their own mental and physiological processes.

Unfortunately, public debates do not have much room for subtlety. The audience wants a quick thrust at your opponent, not a slow and convoluted series of moves.

Our species has advanced from Stone Age to Industrial Revolution to Digital Emptiness. We’ve become weightless, in the bad sense of the word.

And at the place where time stands still, one sees lovers kissing in the shadows of buildings, in a frozen embrace that will never let go.

Every time I’m out and somebody tells me they love what I do, that’s what I do it for. That’s like my vice. That’s like my high. When people understand that this is who I really am, and to be appreciated for your craft .

I find that the love we share fills me up and makes me see and appreciate life in a different way.

Boxing is like jazz. The better it is, the less people appreciate it.

There is a direct correlation between your appreciation of what Christ has done for you and the expression of worship.

I’ve been that celebrity on the red carpet, and I appreciate that something hasn’t got to just look good from the front, from the back, it’s got to look good at all angles.

The only time I get upset by things written about me – when people write irresponsible things about my weight… I appreciate that young girls look up to me. And I take that very seriously.

I still have a lot of pleasure doing them, but as time goes by I come to appreciate more clearly which paintings are good and which should be discarded.

Your favorite virtue? An appreciation for irony.