The cruelest thing anyone can do to Portnoy's Complaint is to read it twice.

Imagination is not something apart and hermetic, not a way of leaving reality behind; it is a way of engaging reality.

The knowledge that makes us cherish innocence makes innocence unattainable.

One great flaw in the reforming passion is that in its eagerness to remedy social wrongs it tends to neglect, certainly to undervalue, the experience of those whose lives it wishes to improve.

Taste speaks through a turn of phrase, a curl of the lip, a shrug of the shoulder: it makes an atmosphere.

Comedy speaks for civilization; farce bears an ill-concealed, sometimes unconcealed animus against civilization. Often against civility too.

Good readers make much out of little.

The message of guidance that neither politics nor philosophy nor religion now seems able to provide, we look for in modern literature.

No one has ever seen the self. It has no visible shape, nor does it occupy measurable space. It is an abstraction, like other abstractions equally elusive: the individual, the mind, the society

He claimed his modest share of the general foolishness of the human race.

Governments neither help us to get out of poverty and hunger, nor let us die. It is time that we must pick one.

The essential reason for my loneliness is that I don't even know where I belong.

I can become so interested in what I have that I forget the needs of my soul.

If I put my name on something, I'm going to be involved. I'm not just going to put my name on it and not pay attention.

Some luck lies in not getting what you thought you wanted but getting what you have, which once you have got it you may be smart enough to see is what you would have wanted had you known.

In any nation in which people's rights have been subordinated to the rights of the few, in any totalitarian nation, the first institution to be dismantled is the jury. I was, I am, afraid.

I forget about the diseases that I have. I don't want to know.

By starving our children of men, we have made them more vulnerable to the very abuse we are trying to prevent.

My mother was the first singer I had contact with. She sang constantly to us around the house, in church.

Love to faults is always blind, always is to joy inclined. Lawless, winged, and unconfined, and breaks all chains from every mind.