If you were meant to cure cancer or write a symphony or crack cold fusion and you don't do it, you not only hurt yourself, even destroy yourself. You hurt your children. You hurt me. You hurt the planet.

Long-term, we must begin to build our internal strengths. It isn't just skills like computer technology. It's the old-fashioned basics of self-reliance, self-motivation, self-reinforcement, self-discipline, self-command.

The more fear we feel about a specific enterprise, the more certain we can be that that enterprise is important to us and to the growth of our soul.

A contemporary or near-future book is much harder because you can't fake the facts. There are people alive who know much more than you do about the subject. You have to really have your research together - and of course no one can know everything about a topic.

The hero wanders, the hero suffers, the hero returns. You are that hero.

When you're a working writer, sooner or later friends and acquaintances will get you alone and confide that they, too, have a book in them.

There's a phrase you hear in Israel: "We're not Jews, we're Israelis." What that means is that the stereotype we're familiar with here in the States of the Diaspora Jew, i.e. Jews in America or Europe or Russia, etc. does not fit at all with the reality of the homegrown "sabras" of Israel.