To me, the solidarity of readers is far more important than the solidarity of writers, particularly since readers in fact find ways to connect over a book or books, whatever they may be.

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.

And a moment that ought to have lasted for everHas come and gone before I knew.

Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.""Two possibilities exist: Either we are alone in the Universe or we are not. Both are equally terrifying.

Schools don't really allow failure and yet it's part of any endeavour, not just writing.

Experiences teaches us that to love is not to gaze at one another but to gaze together in the same direction.

I think in life, the sense of humor and comedy always exists.

You know full well as I do the value of sisters' affections: There is nothing like it in this world.

Trust the comfy clothes you reach for day after day, your plain, regular, essential self.

The affectionate farce I make of him ignores the ways I feel his lack of love for me. But we are managing.

When we hear phrases like 'New World Order,' we release the safety catches on our revolvers.

Together, we can make ourselves a nation that spends more on books than on bombs, more on hospitals than the terrible tools of war, more on decent houses than military aircraft.