I write and read with the assumption that literature contains knowledge of human experience that is not available otherwise.

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.

My sister don't talk much. When she does, it's only to me, in moth-winged whispers, and only when we're alone.

Good breeding consists in concealing how much we think of ourselves and how little we think of the other person.

I wonder if the greatest challenges was to keep pressing into [writing] when I had never been here before. I felt like Abraham - being called to something that he didn't know how to get to.

Through the use of books I had the whole world at my feet: could travel anywhere, meet anyone, and do anything.

This quality of self-denial in pursuit of a longer-term goal and, indeed, the willpower to maintain the denial, is excellent training for the boardroom.

I only knew that there was a certain rightness in life--the feeling you got when you did something the way you knew you should.

Personally, I find it romantic not to be with someone all the time; you don't get used to someone or take them for granted.

Fans always ask me to marry them so I'll have a lot of wives

Everybody always thinks the grass is always greener.