My dad had this outlook: It doesn't matter what I want to read - reading was a good thing. So whatever I was curious about they'd get for me from the library. Books were a kind of a resistance to reality. I liked to imagine worlds that were different. I still do.

Sufi poetry is, in a sense, self-help poetry about how to live a decent life, how to deal with your mortality.

Outside of America, there are many people, myself included, who champion values that, in some senses, could be thought of as traditionally American - the idea that everybody's equal, that the rights of women and men should be the same, that there should be no discrimination on religious or sexual orientation, that democracy and rule of law and due process are the ways in which society should govern themselves and minorities should be cared for.

We need a self because the complexity of the chemical processes that make up our individual humanities exceeds the processing power of our brains.

I think that people are going to move. They always have and that's going to continue. The question is, how are we going to deal with it?

The mobile phone is very dangerous. If you're walking and looking at your phone, you're not walking - you're surfing the internet.

When the machine of a human being is turned on, it seems to produce a protagonist, just as a television produces an image.