Don't always come when you're called.
We may not need God to tell us where the world came from, but we need God to be able to live moral lives and for there to be morality in the first place.
Everyone loves a hero. What we differ on is the question of who the heroes are, because we differ over what matters. And who matters is a function of what matters. [If] what matters is intelligence, the people who matter are the intelligent, and the people who matter the most, the heroes, are the geniuses.
Those who share my heroes are, in the deepest sense, of my own kind.
To matter, to mind. . . . What we mind is in our power, but whether we matter may not be - and there's the tragedy. . . . Can anyone truthfully say, I don't matter and I don't mind?
Plato dramatically puts the detachment of the philosopher from his time this way: to philosophize is to prepare to die.
Mother' is not an identity one can just try on for size.
I told my agent which women I aspire to have a career like: Frances McDormand, Kate Winslet, Laura Linney and Emma Thompson - character actresses who have something to say. I also said that I loved Madeline Kahn and Jessica Lange.
There are heroisms all round us waiting to be done.
Not only has my latest book, The Wandering Who?, rocked the boat, but it also has managed to unite Alan Dershowitz and Abe Foxman with Ali Abunimah and Max Blumenthal. That is pretty encouraging: it means that peace may prevail after all.
I wasn't at all focused on school, and I didn't achieve much. But I've got a sense of urgency now. I feel I can't let any more time waste away.