I write five, six days a week. The thing is capturing the voice. I feel like I've been perfecting one voice - in different iterations, sure, but the Russian-ness has always been the undercurrent.

Reading is entering into the consciousness of another human being.

The love I felt for her on that train ride had a capital and provinces, parishes and a Vatican, an orange planet and many sullen moons -- it was systemic and it was complete.

If you stop thinking, if you stop wondering, you die.

The fading light is us, and we are, for a moment so brief (...) beautiful.

Good fiction makes me turn off all the other parts of my brain, so that I become quiet and submissive, entirely at the mercy of the work at hand.

She took my hand and pulled me after her, her shoulders giving off a sweet peppermint concoction that the bodies of young women sometimes produce to make my life more difficult.

If my mother hadn't tried to sell me chicken Kiev cutlets for $1.40 after I graduated from college, maybe I would've been the lawyer she wanted me to be.

You are not what you want. You are what wants you back.

Forget the fountain of youth, pal of mine. You can live to be a thousand, and it won't matter. Mediocrities like you deserve immortality.

If you read only one memoir by a disaffected, urban, 20-something Jewish girl this year, make it this one. Shukert rocks the lulav.

More business is lost every year through neglect than through any other cause.

My reason for choosing diamonds is that, dense as they are, they represent the greatest worth in the smallest volume.

People's reputations are made in the bad times more than the good times.

If we say that anyone who 'moralizes' must be perfect morally then we are in effect saying no one can moralize.

Freemasonry, Judaism, and Occultism, whose alliance and reciprocal interpretation no longer require demonstration.

The spider is an animal who eats mosquitoes. That's why I love the spider - it is the only way we have to deal with these insects.

I had done a little bit one other time. This character [in Jack Reacher] is a psychopath, but I had been hired by Carlton Cuse and Randall Wallace.

Self-pity - it's the only pity that counts.

E-books are impervious to analogy.

There's a lot of idiots in Hollywood, a lot of people with no imagination, so as an actor you have to constantly re-show them what you can do.