I have a very sharp tongue, I'm very impatient, and it's a lifelong struggle.

Storytelling is fine as long as you can encourage people to act on the stories.

Creation stories had never been regarded as historically accurate; their purpose was therapeutic. But once you start reading Genesis as scientifically valid, you have bad science and bad religion.

My study of religion, which I regard in many ways as an art form, is a search for meaning.

Alas, all traditions lose their primal purity and we all fail our founders.

Religions don't own compassion; it is a human virtue.

Nirvana is something within you. It is not an external reality. No god thunders down from the mountaintop. Just as the great mystics in the Christian, Jewish and Muslim faiths all discovered, God is within the self. God is virtually inseparable from ourselves.