...the greatest source of misery in the world, the greatest cause of anguish and hatred and sadness and death, was neither disease nor race nor religion. It was hope.

Roads are no place for naive chickens dreaming of nirvana.

Anger and depression are not diseases or dysfunctions or anomalies; they are perfectly rational responses to the myriad avoidable disappointments that begin in a thoroughly irrational hope.

My point is that death is more tragic than life, than any life, because every life has hope of some kind.

Kugel was a firm believer that death was not always a bad thing - that life often reached such levels of crapitude that dying was preferable to living.

Written with passion, honesty, humor, and a stubborn, rebellious optimism, Dear Marcus is like nothing I've ever read. When a bullet in the back told Jerry McGill not to go on, Jerry went on-smiling.

Expecting hell, we're ill prepared for heaven.

Sages tell us that the Torah tells us that until the age of thirteen, all of boy's sins are ascribed to his father.

So desperate was Kugel for things to turn out for the best, proclaimed Professor Jove, that he couldn't stop worrying about the worst. Hope, said Professor Jove, was Solomon Kugel's greatest failing.

Your duty is to treat everybody with love as a manifestation of the Lord.

I do know I'm a control freak.

If you want to buy a good movie, you'll buy a good movie. If you don't want to buy a good movie, you'll buy a 'Twilight' movie.

I needed a huge amount of energy to cope with my life. I had a huge amount of energy where stuff was concerned: it was as if all this unconscious material had been unleashed.

But it is impossible, I find, to tidy books without ending by sitting on the floor in the middle of a great untidiness and reading.

I never cared about whatever tragic event happened in China. It's faraway decoration, even if in blood and plague.

How you dress on the outside, it represents your soul.

Some 80% of your life is spent working. You want to have fun at home; why shouldn't you have fun at work?

Every novel begins with the speculative question, What if "X" happened? That's how you start.

Museums, I love museums.