I like the idea of a book being a democratic space which readers enter, carrying their own thoughts, and participate in a conversation, or experience of grace.

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.

Humility is not a virtue in a writer, it is an absolute necessity.

Try not to trip, " she added. "We don't have time for a concussion today."I groaned. That would be just like me - ruin everything, destroy the world, in a moment of klutziness.

It's not the job of the art to accommodate me and make me more money, make me more famous and get me more girls.

[Barack] Obama doesn't disappoint me, because all during the campaign he said, I'm a pragmatic, middle-of-the-road, compromising politician.

I try to perfect my strong points and make my weaknesses adequate.

I am Presbyterian and Protestant. I've had great relationships and developed even greater relationships with ministers. We have tremendous support from the clergy.

I have invested some money and I have a home, but people don't realise that you might only be working for a few weeks of the year and remain unemployed the rest of the time.

Everything evens up, you just wait, Even a garbage can gets a steak, You ain't even a garbage can, you have faith!

I believe that in the ideal school we have the reconciliation of the individualistic and the institutional ideals.

It takes a few years to understand what we've lived through. At the moment, we're still sort of mired in the irrelevant bullshit. There isn't yet that public conversation about 9/11.