As a species we are always hungry for new knowledge.

Each work seems to give me the most trouble at the time I'm working on it.

I don't work on my Sabbath. I write five-and-a-half or six days a week.

Two hundred or more years ago most people on the planet were never aware of any reality other than the one into which they were brought up.

And yet there are some magnificent things from Freud, profound insights into the nature of man.

I think most serious writers, certainly in the modern period, use their own lives or the lives of people close to them or lives they have heard about as the raw material for their creativity.

A non-fiction writer pretty much has the shape of the figure in front of him or her and goes about refining it. A work of non-fiction is not as difficult to write as a work of fiction, but it's not as satisfying in the end.

Come, let us have some tea and continue to talk about happy things.

It is inconceivable to me that a million or three million or half a million human beings will think and feel precisely the same way on any single subject.

I'm not altogether certain that a fundamentalism of necessity has to argue that it is the only reading of the human experience in order to stay alive.

It is impossible to fuse totally with a culture for which you feel a measure of antagonism.

All of us grow up in particular realities - a home, family, a clan, a small town, a neighborhood. Depending upon how we're brought up, we are either deeply aware of the particular reading of reality into which we are born, or we are peripherally aware of it.

Yes, there is some thought about making a film of My Name Is Asher Lev.

As a species we are always hungry for new knowledge.

To the extent that I come from a deeply religious tradition and have been contending with those beginnings all of my life - that constitutes the subject of much of my early fiction.

I think that to a very great extent we are partners with the divine in this enterprise called history. That is an ongoing relationship, and there is absolutely no guarantee that things will automatically work out to our best advantage.

But today we become aware of other readings of the human experience very quickly because of the media and the speed with which people travel the planet.

In other words, Judaism is not Calvinism.

I get up around 6:30. I work from about 8:00 to 1:00, take a break for lunch, work again until about 5:00, and then go for a long walk and have dinner. Then, if my wife and I have no previous plans, we decide what to do for the evening.

What I have in advance are people I want to write about and a problem or problems that I see those people encountering and that I want to explore - it all proceeds sentence by sentence, paragraph by paragraph, and scene by scene.

There is in my work a very strong religious foreground and background. In the later work some of that tends to diminish, but it's certainly present in the early work.

And these two elements are at odds with one another because Freud is utterly adversary to almost all the ways of structuring the human experience found in Western religions. No Western religion can countenance Freud's view of man.

I'm constantly revising. Once the book is written and typed, I go through the entire draft again.

If I had a plot that was all set in advance, why would I want go through the agony of writing the novel? A novel is a kind of exploration and discovery, for me at any rate.

A book is sent out into the world, and there is no way of fully anticipating the responses it will elicit. Consider the responses called forth by the Bible, Homer, Shakespeare - let alone contemporary poetry or a modern novel.

Well, in The Chosen, Danny Saunders, from the heart of his religious reading of the world, encounters an element in the very heart of the secular readings of the world - Freudian psychoanalytic theory.

Every man who has shown the world the way to beauty, to true culture, has been a rebel, a 'universal' without patriotism, without home, who has found his people everywhere.

I think the hardest part of writing is revising. And by that I mean the following: A novelist has to create the piece of marble and then chip away to find the figure in it.

Well, one hopes that if you're really related to the core of your particular culture, you have profound commitments to it, and that you are aware of how much you can strain it before you do violence to its essential nature.

A blink of an eye in itself is nothing. But the eye that blinks that is something.

Truth has to be given in riddles. People can't take truth if it comes charging at them like a bull. The bull is always killed. You have to give people the truth in a riddle, hide it so they go looking for it and find it piece by piece; that way they learn to live with it.

If I had to come up with something that just came to me, I think growing up in a small town, I want knowledge. I still think today, knowledge is one of the keys.

My mom took me to see Carnal Knowledge and The Wild Bunch and all these kind of movies when I was a kid.

Education is a private matter between the person and the world of knowledge and experience, and has little to do with school or college.

Contention is inseparable from creating knowledge. It is not contention we should try to avoid, but discourses that attempt to suppress contention.

Harvard is first and foremost a university and not a consulting operation, and our job here is to teach and to research and to create knowledge on Asia in conjunction and in cooperation with scholars as well as with political, intellectual, and cultural leaders in Asia.

It was very interesting for me because DNA made music without much technical knowledge at all.

But, in the name of the experimental method and out of our poor knowledge, are we really entitled to claim that everything happens by chance, to the exclusion of all other possibilities?

The greatest gift is the passion for reading. It is cheap, it consoles, it distracts, it excites, it gives you knowledge of the world and experience of a wide kind. It is a moral illumination.

We must develop knowledge optimization initiatives to leverage our key learnings.

When a doctor does go wrong he is the first of criminals. He has nerve and he has knowledge.

There are in fact two things, science and opinion; the former begets knowledge, the later ignorance.

Knowledge is the treasure of a wise man.

We don't focus as much in schools on educational knowledge which requires thinking and application, as we do on acquiring facts.

The man of knowledge must be able not only to love his enemies but also to hate his friends.

The art and science of asking questions is the source of all knowledge.

The benefits of education and of useful knowledge, generally diffused through a community, are essential to the preservation of a free government.

Today knowledge has power. It controls access to opportunity and advancement.

Effective use of Braille is as important to the blind as independent mobility, knowledge in the use of adaptive technology, and the core belief that equality, opportunity and security are truly possible for all people who are blind.