I'm a light sleeper. I've never been one of those people who can put their head down and suddenly everything disappears. Nighttime is the time I get most scared anxious or worried. In those darker moments before waking or sleeping is when I feel most I don't know I can turn on myself and my imagination can take me dark places.

You will recognize your own path when you come upon it because you will suddenly have all the energy and imagination you will ever need.

There are moments when a man's imagination so easily subdued to what it lives in suddenly rises above its daily level and surveys the long windings of destiny.

We're living in a time when the world has suddenly discovered India because it's run out of raw material for its imagination. The raw materials for imagination are inexhaustible here.

About 15 years ago I went though a period of a year or so when I just couldn't find anything good. My wife noticed I was having trouble reading menus. I bought some cheap reading glasses in a drug store. I got home and suddenly all these books that weren't good were good.

You know the sad thing of post-9/11 which was of course horrific was that the city in which I felt completely at home for two decades suddenly people like us - brown people - were looked at as the 'Others.'

When I am made fun of in the press I just remember those days when I'd come home to find that the water had been turned off because my mother couldn't afford the bill. Suddenly everything feels easier.

The year 2008 was a reminder to those who had forgotten that there is such a thing as history and that the cycle of famine and feast in commerce first identified in antiquity and well understood in the Middle Ages was not suddenly abolished in modern times.

With the perspective afforded by the passage of time where does 9/11 rank as a turning point in our national history? For the victims and their families innocents going about their lives suddenly and brutally murdered no other day can ever matter as much.

Presidents quickly realize that while a single act might destroy the world they live in no one single decision can make life suddenly better or can turn history around for the good.