I am firmly of the opinion that people who can’t speak have nothing to say. It’s one more thing we do to the poor, the deprived: cut out their tongues … allow them a language as lousy as their life

The true alchemists do not change lead into gold; they change the world into words.

Blue is therefore most suitable as the color of interior life.

Sports, politics, and religion are the three passions of the badly educated.

it is discouraging to leave the past behind only to see it coming toward you like the thunderstorm which drenched you yesterday.

It’s not the word made flesh we want in writing, in poetry and fiction, but the flesh made word

For me, the short story is not a character sketch, a mouse trap, an epiphany, a slice of suburban life. It is the flowering of a symbol center. It is a poem grafted onto sturdier stock.

I am unlikely to trust a sentence that comes easily.

I write because I hate. A lot. Hard.

The expression to write something down suggests a descent of thought to the fingers whose movements immediately falsify it.

The speeding reader guts a book the way the skillful clean fish. The gills are gone, the tail, the scales, the fins; then the fillet slides away swifly as though fed to a seal.

We seek God so earnestly, Eliav reflected, not to find Him but to discover ourselves.

As long as imperialism exists it will, by definition, exert its domination over other countries. Today that domination is called neocolonialism.

Maybe you know why a child can reject a hot dog with mustard served on a soft bun at home, yet eat six of them two hours later at fifty cents each.

love is always in danger of being sentimentalized.

Would you mind getting off that fly paper and giving the flies a chance?" "Ahhh, you can't trick me! Flies don't read papers!

We shall awaken from our dullness and rise vigorously toward justice. If we fall in love with creation deeper and deeper, we will respond to its endangerment with passion.

...in seduction, as in all forms of marketing, form superseds content.

Little boxes made of ticky-tacky, and they all look just the same.

Never, ever, ever wear anything you are uncomfortable in. Because that is what you'll project: 'I look like a fool.'

It's a fairly recent thing but I've become very fond of making drinks myself.