I'm still happy with the way Einstein's Dreams came out. That book came out of a single inspiration. I really felt like I was not creating the words, that I was hearing the words. 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.

Human beings consider themselves satisfied only compared to some other condition. A man who has owned nothing but a bicycle all of his life feels suddenly wealthy the moment he buys an automobile...But this happy sensation wears off. After a while the car becomes just another thing that he owns. Moreover, when his neighbor next door buys two cars, in an instant our man feels wretchedly poor and deprived.

A person who cannot imagine the future is a person who cannot contemplate the results of his actions. Some are thus paralyzed into inaction.

We've lost our way, we have lost our centeredness. We don't have the time, literally, to think during the day. To listen to ourselves think. To think about where we are going, who we are, what's important. I would bet most people don't have thirty minutes in a day where they can just sit down and think. Or maybe they don't have to be sitting, they can be walking.

I have a family and you know very well the time that that takes. That's good time. I have a couple hobbies. I'm a runner and play tennis. In the summer my family and I uproot ourselves and go live in Maine for the summer. We have a house on a very tiny island in Maine. Which is really my spiritual center. We've been going there for ten years, and it has no ferry service, no bridges, no telephone service. It's really isolated.

In this world, there are two times. There is mechanical time and there is body time. The first is as rigid and metallic as a massive pendulum of iron that swings back and forth, back and forth, back and forth. 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.

For my students who are trying to learn the craft of writing in a writing class - contemporary literature is what's most useful.