In the valley of sorrow, spread your wings.

I don’t care about someone being intelligent; any situation between people, when they are really human with each other, produces ‘intelligence.

My own view is that one cannot be religious in general any more than one can speak language in general; at any given moment one speaks French or English or Swahili or Japanese, but not 'language.

There is a great deal that either has to be given up or be taken away from you if you are going to succeed in writing a body of work.

I was fascinated by quotations and lists. And then I noticed that other people were fascinated by quotations and lists: people as different as Borges and Walter Benjamin, Novalis and Godard.

Fear binds people together. And fear disperses them. Courage inspires communities: the courage of an example - for courage is as contagious as fear. But courage, certain kinds of courage, can also isolate the brave.

Ultimately ideas come out of a temperament or a sensibility, they are a crystallization or a precipitation of temperament.