Quotes on Ifs

It’s not a question of if we make the playoffs; we will. And when we get there, I have no fear of anyone.

What will be the good of the conquest of leisure and health, if no one remembers how to use them?

Doing is the great thing, for if people resolutely do what is right, they come in time to like doing it.

Two things form the bedrock of any open society - freedom of expression and rule of law. If you don't have those things, you don't have a free country.

The response of anybody interested in liberty is that we all have a say and the ability to have an argument is exactly what liberty is, even though it may never be resolved. In any authoritarian society the possessor of power dictates, and if you try and step outside he will come after you.

Perhaps because my relationship with my father went through such a long, bumpy time, it's been very important for me to work to try to keep lines of communication open between my sons and myself to try to avoid my father's mistakes. At least if you're making mistakes, make different mistakes.

If there were Israeli attacks on Iranian nuclear facilities, it makes it certain there would be a reprisal attack against the United States at some point.

If you're on a freeway and want to know if you're being followed, what you do is enormously vary your speed. You accelerate to 100 and slow down to 30 and then accelerate again. In a city, you make a lot of turns against the stream of traffic. You go around a roundabout twice.

I can walk into a bookshop and point out a number of books that I find very unattractive in what they say. But it doesn't occur to me to burn the bookshop down. If you don't like a book, read another book. If you start reading a book and you decide you don't like it, nobody is telling you to finish it.

As a writer, one of the things we all learned from the movies was a kind of compression that didn't exist before people were used to watching films. For instance, if you wanted to write a flashback in a novel, you once had to really contextualize it a lot, to set it up. Now, readers know exactly what you're doing. Close-ups, too.

The accidents of my life have given me the ability to make stories in which different parts of the world are brought together, sometimes harmoniously, sometimes in conflict, and sometimes both - usually both. The difficulty in these stories is that if you write about everywhere you can end up writing about nowhere.

If Turkey wants to join Europe, it will have to become a European country, and that might take a long time.

If you have children you worry about the world you're leaving them.

If the creative artist worries if he will still be free tomorrow, then he will not be free today.

Dissensions between Muslim nations run at least as deep, if not deeper, than those nations' resentment of the West.

In a novel, if you're any good, you don't just have good people or bad people. You have complicated people. You have real people.

If there were no poetry on any day in the world, poetry would be invented that day. For there would be an intolerable hunger.

Have you considered that if you don't make waves, nobody including yourself will know that you are alive?

People are always calling me a mirror and if a mirror looks into a mirror, what is there to see?

If you do everything as if it were the last thing you were doing in your life, and stop being aimless, stop letting your emotions override what your mind tells you, stop being hypocritical, self-centered, irritable.

We cannot master everything, taste everything, understand everything, drain every experience to its last dregs. But if we have the courage to let almost everything else go, we will probably be able to retain the thing necessary for us-whatever it may be. If we are too eager to have everything, we will almost certainly miss even the one thing we need