I don't believe in inspiration. I write when I can't avoid writing anymore.

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 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.

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.

There is no brightness without darkness. There is no body without its shadow.

If you stay focused on one task or thought at a time you will less likely become frustrated.

I turned my ear toward the door because I heard him breathing. When you’re alone and afraid, the simple sound of the steady in and out of air being drawn by another person is good medicine.

Life is about change, it never stops, it's moving and it's moving this human body inexorably towards its demise.

Prayer is the Lord's great sterilizer against the germs of spiritual disease.

The affections are like lightning: you cannot tell where they will strike till they have fallen.

Who would I marry? I know, my ego. We'd make the perfect couple.

Boko Haram will soon know the strength of our collective will.

Some prayers are followed by silence because they are wrong, others because they are bigger than we can understand.

I came out of repertory theater, where I worked 50 weeks a year, and I loved working with a team.