I was born Moishe Ketzelbourd but the Indians call me Maurice Cougar.

I always lived in old buildings, and I thought about who lived here before. You'd have to be oblivious not to.

The click [of a light switch] is the modern triumphal clarion proceeding us through life, announcing our entry into every lightless room.

I never wore a watch. I always depend on public clocks, and stores have clocks, but that is strange.

I live in an apartment building built in 1925, and it hasn't been heavily renovated, so I feel very much connected to that time and what went on in that place.

A picture story just doesn't run like a film. It doesn't have 24 frames per second. It doesn't deal with this illusion of movement.

I've wasted the last five years of my life dealing in religious articles. People today find spiritual solace in ballroom dancing.

Goat curry and a female librarian, that's what I'm in the mood for.

I'm very interested in music and where these sounds of Western music come from.

I think Jewish history did away with a priesthood when the Temple was destroyed, and it became, supposedly, a religion of scholars. A rabbi is just a scholar.

Really interesting novels, they always are so demanding of you on some level that you don't fall asleep.

The mystical non-sense of afterlife indeed gives solace to the mind in times of weakness, but why should the mind let its weakness be the fuel for primitiveness in the first place!

Art is a place where tragedy meets beauty. An artist is someone who creates the most beautiful things of his life when his soul starts bleeding.

You must wear clothes which suits your own soul, not your own society! What you wish to do is much more important than what your society wants you to do!

...you can't rationalize suffering - it's indeterminate - the real unknowable variable God substitutes in...

Lincoln began to emerge from his funk by helping a coworker who looked up to him out of a funk of his own.

For someone so intuitive, ” he said, shaking his head, “sometimes you only see what you expect to see.

Of all the nasty outcomes predicted for women's liberation... none was more alarming, from a feminist point of view, than the suggestion that women would eventually become just like men.

I prefer nothing, unless it is true.

The minute you walk outside of your church on Sunday you're in mission territory.

The most valuable lesson man has learned from his dog is to kick a few blades of grass over it and move on.