A writer or any suffering artist-to-be is just an instrument too finely set to the human condition [...]

Reading is entering into the consciousness of another human being.

The love I felt for her on that train ride had a capital and provinces, parishes and a Vatican, an orange planet and many sullen moons -- it was systemic and it was complete.

If you stop thinking, if you stop wondering, you die.

The fading light is us, and we are, for a moment so brief (...) beautiful.

Good fiction makes me turn off all the other parts of my brain, so that I become quiet and submissive, entirely at the mercy of the work at hand.

She took my hand and pulled me after her, her shoulders giving off a sweet peppermint concoction that the bodies of young women sometimes produce to make my life more difficult.

If my mother hadn't tried to sell me chicken Kiev cutlets for $1.40 after I graduated from college, maybe I would've been the lawyer she wanted me to be.

You are not what you want. You are what wants you back.

Forget the fountain of youth, pal of mine. You can live to be a thousand, and it won't matter. Mediocrities like you deserve immortality.

If you read only one memoir by a disaffected, urban, 20-something Jewish girl this year, make it this one. Shukert rocks the lulav.

Strength does not come from winning. Your struggles develop your strengths. When you go through hardships and decide not to surrender that is strength.

Dot Hacker, to me, sounds like a collection of all my tastes. I hear four people trying to fill up as much space as they can.

Most ignorance is vincible ignorance. We don't know because we don't want to know.

I always outworked everybody. Work never bothered me as it bothers some people.

Maybe in the 90s or possibly in the next century people will look upon the 80s as the age of masturbation, when it was taken to the limit; that might be all that's going on right now in a big way.

People love a true story and especially a true story where two people from opposite worlds come together.

By doing good we become good.

They ought to put out the eyes of painters as they do goldfinches in order that they can sing better.

I'm really close to all of my family.

Any time you do physical stuff, violence, it is controlled. It's a little bit like you block the move.