We all owe death a life.

I would argue that religion comes from a desire to get to the questions of, 'Where do we come from?' and 'How shall we live?' And I would say I don't need religion to answer those questions.

It may be argued that the past is a country from which we have all emigrated, that its loss is part of our common humanity.

Vertigo is the conflict between the fear of falling and the desire to fall.

What I've always tried to find in my books are points at which the private lives of the characters, and also my own, intersect with the public life of the culture.

People can do bad things with free speech as well as good. You have to defend the Ku Klux Klan as well as Martin Luther King. It's like that. If you're going to defend the principle, then you have to defend people who use the principle badly.

I do think that there is such a thing as human nature, and that the things that we have in common are perhaps greater than the things that divide us.