New York is the Hollywood of the publishing industry, complete with stars, starlets, suicidal publishers/producers, intrigues, and a lot of money.

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.

You entered like a spark and lightened my candle called life. You will continue to burn until I melt don’t completely.

Some minds improve by travel, others, rather, resemble copper wire, or brass, which get the narrower by going farther.

Trains are all the ways you miss each other-wrong train, wrong tracks, wrong time.

Only sterility is noble and dignified. Only killing what never was is elevated and perverse and absurd.

I guess heaven needed a shortstop.

Goose [pen] bee [wax] and calf [parchment] govern the world. [Lat., Anser, apie, vitellus, populus et regna gubernant.]

I look at my jersey and see the NBA logo, I'm like, 'I didn't think I'd be here.'

There's an army story in me, and I think there's a WWII Brooks film somewhere.

I am still a keen mountain walker and an enthusiastic glider pilot.

When people say, 'If I had my life over again I wouldn't do anything different,' well, I'd do everything differently just for the variety.