Particularly as a Jew, I don't like missionary work. I've had it focused on me, and I don't like it. Let people be what they want to be.

He moved like a dancer, which is not surprising; a horse is a beautiful animal, but it is perhaps most remarkable because it moves as if it always hears music.

Words were all he knew; they possessed and overwhelmed him, as if they were a thousand white cats with whom he shared a one-room apartment.

Well-timed silence is the most commanding expression.

One is attracted to beauty. Beauty is the coordination of things, in such a way, that it is what attracts you. It's almost self-defining.

The shelf was filled with books that were hard to read, that could devastate and remake one's soul, and that, when they were finished, had a kick like a mule.

They gave themselves up to the stars the way swimmers can surrender to the waves, and the stars took them without resistance.

And if you were a spirit, and time did not bind you, and patience and love were all you knew, then there you would wait for someone to return, and the story to unfold.

If it weren't for music, I would think that love is mortal.

Marxists are people whose insides are torn up day after day because they want to rule the world and no one will even publish their letter to the editor.

And how does God speak to you?" "In the language of everything that is beautiful.

We cannot say that if a child is badly nourished he will become a criminal. We must see what conclusion the child has drawn.

The law is above the law, you know.

Tis immortality, 'tis that alone, Amid life's pains, abasements, emptiness, The soul can comfort, elevate, and fill. That only, and that amply this performs.

Yeah, if it hadn't been for me everybody'd be a lot better off--my wife and my kids and my friends.... I wish I'd never been born.I suppose it'd been better if I'd never been born at all.

My parents split up when I was about 2. I realize more and more how much I'm like my father. My gentleness comes from my mother.

[Cuba's goverment] is an anti-American government.

The funny thing is that I feel close to all my characters. Deep, deep inside them all. I can't describe how deeply I love them all.

By the way, when I say cut taxes, I don't mean fiddle with the code. I mean abolish the income tax and the IRS, and replace them with nothing.

It's very rare you get a great script just handed to you, or sent to you, by someone you don't know.

A writer is trying to create believable people in credible moving situations in the most moving way he can.