Goat curry and a female librarian, that's what I'm in the mood for.

I always lived in old buildings, and I thought about who lived here before. You'd have to be oblivious not to.

The click [of a light switch] is the modern triumphal clarion proceeding us through life, announcing our entry into every lightless room.

I never wore a watch. I always depend on public clocks, and stores have clocks, but that is strange.

I live in an apartment building built in 1925, and it hasn't been heavily renovated, so I feel very much connected to that time and what went on in that place.

A picture story just doesn't run like a film. It doesn't have 24 frames per second. It doesn't deal with this illusion of movement.

I was born Moishe Ketzelbourd but the Indians call me Maurice Cougar.

I've wasted the last five years of my life dealing in religious articles. People today find spiritual solace in ballroom dancing.

I'm very interested in music and where these sounds of Western music come from.

I think Jewish history did away with a priesthood when the Temple was destroyed, and it became, supposedly, a religion of scholars. A rabbi is just a scholar.

Really interesting novels, they always are so demanding of you on some level that you don't fall asleep.

Hatred is a death wish for the hated not a life wish for anything else.

Now hollow fires burn out to black, And lights are guttering low: Square your shoulders, lift your pack And leave your friends and go.

When I'm asked about legacy, I say it's too early to talk about legacy.

Marriage was a goal. A family, for me as a young girl, was my image of what I hoped for. It was part of the big picture.

[On hearing that Clare Boothe Luce was invariably kind to her inferiors:] And where does she find them?

The writing itself is no big deal. The editing, and even more than that, the self-doubt, is excruciatingly impossible.

Every life is, more or less, a ruin among whose debris we have to discover what the person ought to have been.

O my Lord Jesus Christ, if I could be in heaven without Thee, it would be hell; and if I could be in hell, and have Thee still, it would be heaven to me, for Thou are all the heaven I want.

I'd love to do a whole series of stories and have them collected into books.

There's no doubt that I've deserved my enemies, but I don't think I've deserved my friends.