"It's not easy to sit down and open yourself up and say, 'This is how much I love you,' you know? It's scary to do that."

"I'm not trying to steer people in a direction. I'm just trying to move them. Wherever it takes them, it doesn't matter to me. I just want them to be moved in one way or another, and that's a hard thing to do, I think."

"I think sometimes I write to impress my influences. Whether they're actually acquaintances of mine, people that I think will hear the record or not, I still write - not to imitate my influences - but to write something that would live up to their standards."

"I write pretty much year-round, but I definitely do more when a deadline is looming."

"I took a speed-reading course and read War and Peace in twenty minutes. It involves Russia."

"History will be kind to me for I intend to write it."

"I wonder if I ever thought of an ideal reader... I guess when I was in my 20s and in New York and maybe even in my early 30s, I would write for my wife Janice... mainly for my poet friends and my wife, who was very smart about poetry."

"The unutterable violence of the Holocaust shook our confidence in the possibility of telling any story of faith at all."