I always think that good writers should be growing up on the brink of death - it really lets them see mortality very clearly.

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.

He talked about the future with such certainty, he might have been talking about the past.

She'd just thrown gasoline on the fire. Now it was up to fandom to keep it burning.

People quit people before they quit companies.

I am, emphatically. Mental illness triggered by xperimental error.

Join the crazed institution of the stars.

My father and I, we finally saw each other eye to eye and I think he's seeing me as a man, and I'm seeing him as the father he's always been.

Good critical writing is measured by the perception and evaluation of the subject; bad critical writing by the necessity of maintaining the professional standing of the critic.

Religion began when the first scoundrel met the first fool.