I believe people are much more complicated than they can handle.

When I look at my old pictures, all I can see is what I used to be but am no longer. I think: What I can see is what I am not.

Home is where somebody notices when you are no longer there.

The perfect borscht is what life should be but never is.

Belief and delusion are incestuous siblings.

I am itching to criticize some well-regarded writers' works, but I am not doing it because I am perfectly aware that my critique could easily be reduced to envy or just plain meanness.

I gradually became aware that my interiority was inseparable from my exteriority, that the geography of my city was the geography of my soul.

I much preferred winning to thinking and I didn't like losing at all.

You don't want your neurosurgeon to have doubts about the meaning of it all while he or she is operating on your brain.

If you can't go home, there is nowhere to go, and nowhere is the biggest place in the world-indeed, nowhere is the world.

We knew - but didn't want to know - what was going to happen, the sky descending upon our heads like the shadow of a falling piano in a cartoon.

Life lessons cannot be applied topically.

Lips that Shakespeare taught to speak have whispered their secret in my ear. I have had the arms of Rosalind around me, and kissed Juliet on the mouth.

A life of nothing's nothing worth From that first nothing ere his birth To that last nothing under earth.

A disposition to preserve and an ability to improve taken together would be my standard of a statesman.

I think crime writing is my link with trying to preserve a sort of order.

Chocolate is the divine drink which builds up resistance and fights fatigue. A cup of this precious drink permits a man to walk for a whole day without food.

Upon the creatures we have made, we are, ourselves, at last, dependent.

It loves more readily than it hates.

Familiarity breeds complacency.

I have my faith and my principles, and this is what makes me who I am. If the person loves me, he'll love my God too.