I am itching to criticize some well-regarded writers' works, but I am not doing it because I am perfectly aware that my critique could easily be reduced to envy or just plain meanness.

When I look at my old pictures, all I can see is what I used to be but am no longer. I think: What I can see is what I am not.

Home is where somebody notices when you are no longer there.

The perfect borscht is what life should be but never is.

Belief and delusion are incestuous siblings.

I gradually became aware that my interiority was inseparable from my exteriority, that the geography of my city was the geography of my soul.

I much preferred winning to thinking and I didn't like losing at all.

You don't want your neurosurgeon to have doubts about the meaning of it all while he or she is operating on your brain.

If you can't go home, there is nowhere to go, and nowhere is the biggest place in the world-indeed, nowhere is the world.

We knew - but didn't want to know - what was going to happen, the sky descending upon our heads like the shadow of a falling piano in a cartoon.

I had an epiphany: I was a loser.

Liberty means refusing to allow some men to use the state to compel other men to serve their interests or opinion.

Your first written sentence is the foundation of all of your dreams.

Over time, we would learn each other, and I would learn to love her like a mother loves a daughter, imperfectly and without roots.

Mercy is a source of life because we breathe our own spirits through it into the lives of others.

No truly conscious human being sabotages himself - it's impossible, because it's contrary to Nature.

I have a love of baseball and a love of music.

Vulgarity is innocent; urbanity is not.

Outlaw embryo farming, but allow using surplus embryos.

Humility is the mother of all virtues, courage the father, integrity the child and wisdom the grandchild.

You can't order remembrance out of the mind; and a wrong that was a wrong yesterday must be a wrong to-morrow.