We, as writers, have to figure out a way to create a consciousness in language. It's crazy even to attempt to do that.

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.

Although I've always been easily led by my imagination, I was, and I remain, a rational person.

God don't call the qualified, He qualifies the called

You don't invent circumstances, but when they happen they reveal human nature.

When people are in the midst of really heavy stuff and still have a sense of humor, I admire that.

Many a long dispute among divines may be thus abridged: It is so; It is not so. It is so; it is not so.

98% of the atoms in your body were not there a year ago.

When I look back on the stuff I used to wear, I wonder why somebody didn't try to stop me. Just a friendly warning, "You may regret this," would have been fine.

How do you fight someone if you can't hit them?

Hang yourself, poet, in your own words. Otherwise, you are dead.

You may not have faith in my friend fate, But my friend fate has faith in you.