There's no bad writing; you did something. I was operating inside language, and I did something. I'm not ashamed of it.

When I look at my old pictures, all I can see is what I used to be but am no longer. I think: What I can see is what I am not.

Home is where somebody notices when you are no longer there.

The perfect borscht is what life should be but never is.

Belief and delusion are incestuous siblings.

I am itching to criticize some well-regarded writers' works, but I am not doing it because I am perfectly aware that my critique could easily be reduced to envy or just plain meanness.

I gradually became aware that my interiority was inseparable from my exteriority, that the geography of my city was the geography of my soul.

I much preferred winning to thinking and I didn't like losing at all.

You don't want your neurosurgeon to have doubts about the meaning of it all while he or she is operating on your brain.

If you can't go home, there is nowhere to go, and nowhere is the biggest place in the world-indeed, nowhere is the world.

We knew - but didn't want to know - what was going to happen, the sky descending upon our heads like the shadow of a falling piano in a cartoon.

I have to convince myself every night that I love you before I go to sleep lest I wake up empty.

A lie that is half-truth is the darkest of all lies.

Theodore Roosevelt's father wrote him, "I fear for your future. We cannot stand so corrupt a government for any great length of time.

Hell is more bearable than nothingness.

Passion for fame: A passion which is the instinct of all great souls.

I wonder how biology can explain the physical pain you feel in your chest when all you want to do is be with someone.

Mermaids have no tears, and so they suffer all the more.

The joy of the gospel fills the hearts and lives of all who encounter Jesus.

I have allowed the president to pick his political appointees…But I will not sit quietly and let him shred the Constitution.

Nowhere is it written that NATO had to accept certain countries. All that would have been required to refrain from doing so was the political will. But people didn't want to.