It's as though either you accept [religious] doctrine and then you can have all the nice stuff, or you reject the doctrine and you're living in some kind of spiritual wasteland under the guidance of CNN and Walmart.

At the heart of every frustration lies a basic structure: the collision of a wish with an unyielding reality.

I feel that the great challenge of our time is the communication of ideas.

One of love's greatest drawbacks is that, for a while at least, it is in danger of making us happy.

Our jobs make relentless calls on a narrow band of our faculties, reducing our chances of achieving rounded personalities and leaving us to suspect (often in the gathering darkness of a Sunday evening) that much of who we are, or could be, has gone unexplored.

The mind does most of its best thinking when we aren't there. The answers are there in the morning.

Everyone wants a better life: very few of us want to be better people.