A novelist should make you realize nothing is stable. If you don't believe anything with robustness, you're doing something more radical than anything else.

I could use the company but I can't go through the pain of getting it.

The girls pick snouts from the pack as though they're chocolates and it matters which they select.

I'm a Jewish Jane Austen.

I took the route favoured by all worldly failures and became a spiritual success.

It's never over till it's over with a friend.

All those words of praise they use for novels - spare, economical. Why should I shell out £17 for economical?

What it is to see, what liberties are taken when one looks, where looking leaves one vis-a-vis one's subject, or how far looking ultimately becomes one's subject - these are important questions.

In the matrimonial life of the Jewish male every day is Yom Kippur.

You can't have a church town without belief and you can't have belief without intolerance.

But he didn't have to listen to his father. Taking after your father was optional, wasn't it?

Two possibilities exist: either we are alone in the Universe or we are not. Both are equally terrifying.

Gone was the reflexive need to see the worst in things. Before the tumors took her life, they gave her a few moments of grace.

Sometimes the most beautiful thing is precisely the one that comes unexpectedly and unearned, hence something given truly as a present.

The establishment of our new lawful immigration system then and only then will we be in a position to consider the appropriate disposition of those individuals who remain.

Uncalled-for aggression arouses the hatred of the civilian population.

I get pressure from my audience and my agents to be a 'good girl,' and I'm in the public eye, so if I mess up, it's going to be all over the place.

I suppose Phil Collins offers something for everybody, and in hipdom that's not cool. But in the real world, there's no shame in that at all.

I'm a bit of a nerd, and my extracurricular activity is nerd games.

Values determine behavior; Principles determine the consequences of behavior.

People don't lack resources, they just lack control over their resources.