We are all such escape artists, you and I. We don't like to get too serious about things, especially about ourselves. When we are with other people, we are apt to talk about almost anything under the sun except for what really matters to us, except for our own lives, except for what is going on inside our own skins. We pass the time of day. We chatter. We hold each other at bay, keep our distance from each other even when God knows it is precisely each other that we desperately need.

We've all had saints in our lives, by which I mean not plaster saints, not moral exemplars, not people setting for us a kind of suffocating good example, but I mean saints in the sense of life givers. People through knowing whom we become more alive.

A character is made by the kind of thoughts a man thinks when alone, and a civilization is made by the kind of thoughts a man speaks to his neighbor.

All what I aimed for, except the Olympic medal, I achieved. That's why I want to start the Usha School of Athletics. I missed an Olympic medal, now I want to ensure that one of my students wins one!

I guess we'd be living in a boring, perfect world if everybody wished everybody else well.

God puts people in our lives on purpose so we can help them succeed and help them become all He created them to be. Most people will not reach their full potential without somebody else believing in them.

I confess I take perverse delight as a theologian in the controversies surrounding postmodernism.

And then I met Jerry and he's such a creative fiction writer, and I don't know if there's ever been a team put together the way we are - where one person does the theological way out and suggestions, and the other person goes into the cave and does the fiction writing.

The very fact that doctrine is hewn from bitter controversy and tested through time is sufficient reason to make them a focus of theology.

The struggle for existence holds as much in the intellectual as in the physical world. A theory is a species of thinking, and its right to exist is coextensive with its power of resisting extinction by its rivals.

I try as hard as I know how to keep my reader relating on a broad level so I don't lead her someplace where she thinks that's the only thing that could cause insecurity.

There are a lot of directors I'd still love to work with. Paul Thomas Anderson is someone I'd love to work with. I think Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu is very talented. Ang Lee is very talented. I mean, there are a lot of people. There are many great directors out there.