Unlike real relationships, virtual relationships are easy to enter and to exit. They look smart and clean, feel easy to use, when compared with the heavy, slow-moving, messy real stuff.

The carrying power of a bridge is not the average strength of the pillars, but the strength of the weakest pillar. I have always believed that you do not measure the health of a society by GNP but by the condition of its worst off.

Why do I write books? Why do I think? Why should I be passionate? Because things could be different, they could be made better.

The task for sociology is to come to the help of the individual. We have to be in service of freedom. It is something we have lost sight of.

It is the work of fancy to enlarge, but of judgment to shorten and contract; and therefore this must be as far above the other as judgment is a greater and nobler faculty than fancy or imagination.

Theater's wonderful because it's visceral, and it's happening in front of you, but you never get that close. So the close-up is a great privilege of film.

The rigors of creativity - the self-doubt, the revising, the solitude - do require a kind of self-consumption. It comes at a cost; a cost that isn't for everyone.

I'm the kind of writer that, once I get into writing mode in my brain, I'm non-stop.