I don't do a lot of foisting, because when it comes to books I don't really like to be foisted upon.

The First Amendment has the same role in my life as a citizen and a writer as the sun has in our ecosystem.

Forget about what you are escaping from. Reserve your anxiety for what you are escaping to.

The things I keep going back to, rereading, maybe they say more about me as a reader than about the books. Love in the Time of Cholera, Pale Fire.

Undressing her was an act of recklessness, a kind of vandalism, like releasing a zoo full of animals, or blowing up a dam.

Take care-there is no force more powerful than that of an unbridled imagination.

A delicate, inexorable lattice of inferences began to assemble themselves, like a crystal, in the old man's mind, shivering, catching the light in glints and surmises.

Man makes plans . . . and God laughs.

My Saturday Night. My Saturday night is like a microwave burrito. Very tough to ruin something that starts out so bad to begin with.

Anything good that I have written has, at some point during its composition, left me feeling uneasy and afraid. It has seemed, for a moment at least, to put me at risk.

It's always been hard for me to tell the difference between denial and what used to be known as hope.

False humility is the pride of not being proud, real humility is without the consciousness that pride exists.

And the truth from so much lies.... wasn't ever told...

We never know how much has been missing from our lives until a true writer comes along.

There is peace more destructive of the manhood of living man than war is destructive of his material body.

I come from a very religious background.And actually I remained in it. All my anger I describe in my quarrels with God in Auschwitz, but you know I used to pray every day.

Don't get to the end of your life and realize you have never lived.

Many of our troubles are chronic. Life is chronic.

I have my own religious bond with the God in my own head.

The books are balanced in heaven, not here.

That so few understand me is why I am treasured.