I kind of build a novel the way marine polyps build a coral reef, it's millions and millions of little precarious bodies stacked on one another. And in my case, that's thousands of minutes I go through to get from one scene to the next and build it that way.

Every human being has appetites difficult to control but far fewer have humility, gentleness, and an awareness of their weaknesses.

Most people tend to think the best of those who are blessed with beauty; we have difficulty imagining that physical perfection can conceal twisted emotions or a damaged mind.

If one's friends do not openly laugh at him, they are not in fact his friends.

Not all or even most suffering is at the hands of fate; it befalls us at our invitation.

When a knot gets to tight, you can always cut the rope

There are thousands of proteins in the cells, some of them very large chains of molecules. And the cell doesn't function if one of those chains of molecules isn't there, and you start looking at the complexity of life and the mystery of life, and then start thinking about things like the twenty universal constants, that if any one of them from Plank's minimum to the mass of a proton, if one of them is the tiniest bit off, there would be no life or possibility of it in the universe.