“It's all about quality of life and finding a happy balance between work and friends and family.”

“Creation, whether it's writing, painting or whatever, is essentially despotic and autocratic in nature, because it's the work of one mind and one mind alone which has absolute power of life or death over this sentence, or that phrase or whatever it is. It brooks no interference and can only work if it's the one mind doing it. Reading, on the other hand, interpretation, is inherently, intrinsically democratic, because it is fundamentally a process of negotiation between the mind and the text, between the expectations you bring to it and the satisfactions and disappointments you take away from it.”

“I don’t find our relative insignificance disheartening at all: The main thing it tells me is that in a culture that worships celebrity and the purportedly extraordinary, ALL people are ordinary people. ALL people have the same responsibilities to themselves and to each other. Maybe the universe cares nothing for us, but WE care about each other. And most encouragingly, we care not just for our friends or family but for the whole enterprise of life—we care about strangers and about humpback whales and, most beautifully of all, we care about the dead. We try with our lives to honor theirs. That’s how we make our lives meaningful, and how we make their lives meaningful, too.”

“They [Old Testament] taught me about Life with God: not how it is supposed to work, but how it actually does work.”

“The Royal Tenenbaums," she said. "It's about a family of prodigies.”

“It's about thinking that being blond & slim & perfect will automatically bring you happiness, & then discovering that life is as full of as many disappointments as there were before. ”

“All the history of human life has been a struggle between wisdom and stupidity.”