I hate traveling and being away from my family. But I like meeting my readers, as what I write is actualized in them. Those encounters are exhilarating to me.

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.

Pain can mask itself as a righteous companion

Reaching out to any fellow ghetto kids is an act he puts in the same category as doing drugs: the initial rush of warmth and euphoria puts you on a path to ruin.

The accounting of the sacrifice is, more than anything else, the attitude toward war memorials in our time.

There is usually less romance in marriage than in any other relationship of life. But the general idea concerning marriage is that it is all or nearly all romance.

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Alertness is the hidden discipline of familiarity.

I hate people who think it's clever to take drugs... like custom officers.

I brought Hassan’s son from Afghanistan to America, lifting him from the certainty of turmoil and dropping him in a turmoil of uncertainty

Success is not about how much money we have in the bank, but it's about how many peoples' lives we have impacted through it. Success is experienced when we do things which are never done before.

You knock at the door of Reality. You shake your thought wings, loosen your shoulders, and open.