That's what I always liked about science fiction - you can make the world end. Humour is my multiple warhead delivery system.

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.

No man can keep a secret. If his lips are silent, he chatters with his fingertips.

Here in this ocean, in the midst of all this water, with the red flags on those distant buoys flapping in the sea breeze, I find myself unable to treat our house in Tokyo as anything but a dream.

I just have so many scripts to read!

An imitation may be quite successful in its own way, but imitation can never be Success. Success is a first-hand creation.

The true order of learning should be first, what is necessary; second, what is useful, and third, what is ornamental. To reverse this arrangement is like beginning to build at the top of the edifice.

Everyone has understood me in his own way. But I would have to understand myself first in order to judge - and so far, I haven't.

The female struggle implies the black struggle, it implies the struggle with anti-Semitism, it implies all of the other struggles. That is the only possible way to think about human liberation.

What are you doing here snooping around, Tory? (Medea) I didn’t think I was snooping. It didn’t feel like a snoop. I have snooped before and can honestly say this isn’t it. (Tory)

It's impossible to speak what it is not noble to do.

We could visit him," suggests Will. "But what would we say? 'I didn't know you that well, but I'm sorry you got stabbed in the eye'?