I have a son, but I've never had a daughter. I have a sister, and my sister had a fairly tempestuous relationship with my dad when she was young, and that was gripping and sometimes upsetting.

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.

Commitment is another name for relationship not the compromise.

Some of the freckles I once loved are now closer to liver spots. But it’s still the eyes we look at, isn’t it? That’s where we found the other person, and find them still.

... Why, it would really be being unselfish to go away and be happy for a little, because we would come back so much nicer.

Man may doubt here and there, but mankind does not doubt.

Different groups in different areas developed different traits to assure their survival.

Acting isn't something you do. Instead of doing it, it occurs. If you're going to start with logic, you might as well give up. You can have conscious preparation, but you have unconscious results.

The essence of globalization is a subordination of human rights, of labor rights, consumer, environmental rights, democracy rights, to the imperatives of global trade and investment.

I believe if you’re going to bomb someone you should know them first. It should hurt when you kill someone.

We should not focus on ideas that divide us and pull us apart.

I do the wrong, and first begin to brawl. The secret mischiefs that I set abroach I lay unto the grievous charge of others.