They were Jesuits," she told me. "That means they believe in God but not in terlet paper. You should have seen their underwear. Disgusting.

The Greeks had invented democracy, built the Acropolis and called it a day.

Real love amounts to withholding the truth, even when you're offered the perfect opportunity to hurt someone's feelings.

A zoo is a good place to make a spectacle of yourself, as the people around you have creepier, more photogenic things to look at.

There seemed to be some correlation between devotion to God and a misguided zeal for marshmallows.

All of us take pride and pleasure in the fact that we are unique, but I'm afraid that when all is said and done the police are right: it all comes down to fingerprints.

Remember that the most important thing is to try and love other people as much as they love you.

Everyone looks retarded once you set your mind to it.

I started writing when I was twenty, and my first book came out seventeen years later.

Like all of my friends, she's a lousy judge of character.

A good [short story] would take me out of myself and then stuff me back in, outsized, now, and uneasy with the fit.

When you make the dream of your heart a treasure of heaven, it holds an eternal value.

You know, ” said Jehangir, breaking the silence, “it's only Muslims who use the term 'innovation' to mean something bad.

Though we cannot by our prayers give God any information yet we must by our prayers give him honor.

The problem after a war is with the victor. He thinks he has just proved that war and violence pay. Who will now teach him a lesson?

The Word of God represents all the possibilities of God as at the disposal of true prayer.

My memory loves you… it asks about you all the time.

I have a kind of psychic invisibility. As long as I can stay scared, I can keep people from seeing me. That's what we have to count on.

It is painful to recall a past intensity, to estimate your distance from the Belsen heap, to make your peace with numbers. Just to get up each morning is to make a kind of peace.

the time for prizes and competitions at art festivals is over. Competition is too closely tied to values that are alien to the arts.