Angst is not the human condition, it’s the purgatory between what we have and what we want but can’t get.

History is changed by martyrs who tell the truth.

To be an honest writer, you have to be away from home, and totally alone in life.

It kills me how these days everyone has clinical justification for their strangeness.

Literature is an ethical leap. It is a moral decision. A perilous exercise in constant failure. Literature should have grievances, because there are so many grievances in the world.

Oh, how wonderfully romantic of you. Romantics are really only in love with themselves.

Love and honesty don’t mix.

Oh, sweetheart. What can anyone do? That's just the way things are. You really think you can change the world?

I transform fiction into memory.

Perhaps we have stopped ourselves from being invented, from self-realization, by blaming others for our wordlessness.

Every teenager is both a hero and a failure. When we become adults we have to choose where in the middle we’ll be.

Have peace in your heart to find peace in the outer world.

…he’d assumed their relationship would go on forever. It was going on now, but in another way, like the rearrangement of the stars, which were all still in the sky, just burning in unexpected places.

You do stand alone sometimes. But my mother stood by me through all this.

This is my best time of the year (spring training). Heck, once the season starts, I go to work.

There is no scorn more profound, or on the whole more justifiable, than that of the men who make for the men who explain.

I've always just followed my own course, whatever I found the most interesting to me at the moment. I've never had a real plan of, "I want to get from here to there, and I've got to do this."

The world dies over and over again, but the skeleton always gets up and walks.

Secrecy has many advantages, for when you tell someone the purpose of any object right away, they often think there is nothing to it.

And I definitely gravitate toward people who use laughter to pull themselves out of the abyss.

There is no greater compliment to the Jews than the fact that the degree of their unpopularity is always the scientific measure of the cruelty and silliness of the regime under which they live.