Without humor, I cannot go on and I doubt many of my readers would go on either. Humor is so important. I am here to have fun here with my work.

Reading is entering into the consciousness of another human being.

The love I felt for her on that train ride had a capital and provinces, parishes and a Vatican, an orange planet and many sullen moons -- it was systemic and it was complete.

If you stop thinking, if you stop wondering, you die.

The fading light is us, and we are, for a moment so brief (...) beautiful.

Good fiction makes me turn off all the other parts of my brain, so that I become quiet and submissive, entirely at the mercy of the work at hand.

She took my hand and pulled me after her, her shoulders giving off a sweet peppermint concoction that the bodies of young women sometimes produce to make my life more difficult.

If my mother hadn't tried to sell me chicken Kiev cutlets for $1.40 after I graduated from college, maybe I would've been the lawyer she wanted me to be.

You are not what you want. You are what wants you back.

Forget the fountain of youth, pal of mine. You can live to be a thousand, and it won't matter. Mediocrities like you deserve immortality.

If you read only one memoir by a disaffected, urban, 20-something Jewish girl this year, make it this one. Shukert rocks the lulav.

If that other fellow doesn't know his happiness, well, he'd better look for it soon, or he'll have to deal with me.

I advise you to be suspicious of any black American whose family does not claim a blood connection to Native Americans. That’s a clear sign of a racial infiltrator who has not done enough research.

What can be added to the happiness of man who is in health out of debt and has a clear conscience?

I cannot imagine a God who rewards and punishes the objects of his creation and is but a reflection of human frailty.

Think and wonder, wonder and think.

Today we are engaged in a final, all-out battle between communistic atheism and Christianity.

Will God or someone give me the power to breathe my sigh into my canvases, the sigh of prayer and sadness, the prayer of salvation, of rebirth?

I had my children after eight years of marriage. It was a dream come true. I still pinch myself.

I wouldn't eat a chicken if it dropped dead in front of me holding up a sign that said, Eat Me.

What's wrong with this egotism? If a man doesn't delight in himself and the force in him and feel that he and it are wonders, how is all life to become important to him?