That's one of the many things I hate about life, that it's a hideously cliched business.

Fictional characters are made of words, not flesh; they do not have free will, they do not exercise volition. They are easily born, and as easily killed off.

In order really to write one has to sink deep into the self and become lost there.

All my life I have lied. I lied to escape, I lied to be loved, I lied for placement and power; I lied to lie. It was a way of living; lies are life's almost-anagram.

The past beats inside me like a second heart.

If I was asked to say what was the greatest invention of human beings, I would say the sentence.

Everything we do is tinged with the knowledge that this may be the last time that we will do this, and that makes what we're doing incredibly sweet.

We carry the dead with us only until we die too, and then it is we who are borne along for a little while, and then our bearers in their turn drop, and so on into the unimaginable generations.

To take possession of a city of which you are not a native you must first fall in love there.

For memory, we use our imagination. We take a few strands of real time and carry them with us, then like an oyster we create a pearl around them.

A man is not much if he can't depend on himself, and nothing if others can't depend on him.

The woman I loved died because I did not love her enough - what greater sin is there than that?"(Uncle Chaim and Aunt Fifke and the Angel)

God never made something out of nothing; it is not in the economy or law by which the worlds were, are, or will exist

Authentic human interactions become impossible when you lose yourself in a role.

He who seeks repentance for the past, should woo the angel virtue for the future.

You can be a mother and still be completely sexy.

Our lives disappear, even as we live them.

Seemed to me that drumming was the best way to get close to God.

If we socialized boys like girls, we would have a much lower crime rate in America.

If I do not go within, I go without.

Is the parent better than the child into whom he has cast his ripened being? Whence, then, this worship of the past?