Perhaps we have stopped ourselves from being invented, from self-realization, by blaming others for our wordlessness.

History is changed by martyrs who tell the truth.

To be an honest writer, you have to be away from home, and totally alone in life.

It kills me how these days everyone has clinical justification for their strangeness.

Literature is an ethical leap. It is a moral decision. A perilous exercise in constant failure. Literature should have grievances, because there are so many grievances in the world.

Angst is not the human condition, it’s the purgatory between what we have and what we want but can’t get.

Oh, how wonderfully romantic of you. Romantics are really only in love with themselves.

Love and honesty don’t mix.

Oh, sweetheart. What can anyone do? That's just the way things are. You really think you can change the world?

I transform fiction into memory.

Every teenager is both a hero and a failure. When we become adults we have to choose where in the middle we’ll be.

They turned their desks into a trigonometric war room, poring over equations scrawling ideas on blackboards, evaluating their work, erasing it, starting over.

Oh, is that all you’re looking forward to - a break from your studies?” He peered down at her with a knowing smirk.

We have to surmount the difficulties that face us and work steadfastly for the happiness and prosperity of our country.

I do three things. I do teaching, I do conducting and I do playing. And each one of those sort of helps the other.

Barney Kessel is incredible. He's just amazing . . . . Nobody can play guitar like that

We've learned to see the world in gasps.

We'll be able to have very intelligent, little robots with computers going inside our bloodstream, keeping us healthy from inside, destroying cancer at the level of one cell.

The work in S, M, L, XL was almost suicidal. It required so much effort that our office almost went bankrupt.

Let your children be as so many flowers, borrowed from God. If the flowers die or wither, thank God for a summer loan of them.

Got my fungal foot powder? Ah, it's a lifesaver, you know. I'd effectively be disabled if it weren't for these.