It's not that war crimes stop as soon as a novel about them is published. Literature operates slowly, it is always inching toward bliss, never quite getting there.

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.

Love is the best religion

You shouldn’t have to pretend to be as excited as I am just to make me happy. If it comes to that, you shouldn’t have to pretend to be anything around me. Friends should be real with each other

She looked herself in the eyes and saw that there was nothing left. No sense. It must have gone through that hole in her chest along with everything else.

The Devil's out of fashion.

One must train oneself, by small and frequent efforts, to dominate one's feelings.

Some aim to be deft, others to be laboriously careful. Neither dexterity nor conscientiousness is enough.

Good land, evill way.

As the primary end of History is to record truth, impartiality, fidelity and accuracy are the fundamental qualities of an Historian.

I still favor alternatives to governmental race-based preferences.

In man, at least, satisfaction is commonly followed by boredom.