The czar always got his dues, no matter if it ruined a family.

The apex of my civic pride and personal contentment was reached on the bright September morning when I entered the public school.

On a royal birthday every house must fly a flag, or the owner would be dragged to a police station and be fined twenty-five rubles.

The first meal was an object lesson of much variety. My father produced several kinds of food, ready to eat, without any cooking, from little tin cans that had printing all over them.

It is not that I belong to the past, but the past that belongs to me.

Our mothers are racked with the pains of our physical birth; we ourselves suffer the longer pains of our spiritual growth.

You heard on all sides that the brightest Jewish children were turned down if the examining officers did not like the turn of their noses.

Such creatures of accident are we, liable to a thousand deaths before we are born. But once we are here, we may create our own world, if we choose.

I have so little mastered the art of tranquil living that wherever I go I trail storm clouds of drama around me.

What we get in steerage is not the refuse, but the sinew and bone of all the nations.

You went up to be examined with the other Jewish children, your heart heavy about that matter of your nose.

She fixed me and broke me all at once.

The fifties - they seem to have taken place on a sunny afternoon that asked nothing of you except a drifting belief in the moment and its power to satisfy.

Always follow your dreams, don't let anyone tell you that you can't be something.

Trying to conceal a crime is like burying a seed in the ground.

The loftiest edifices need the deepest foundations.

I know I'm not an anti-Semitic person.

Matterhorn is my metaphor of the Vietnam War - we built it, we abandoned it, we assaulted it, we lost, and then we abandoned it again.

The media have, indeed, provided the Devil with perhaps the greatest opportunity accorded him since Adam and Eve were turned out of the Garden of Eden.

If only I could be hidden in a corner, so as not to be tempted to worry about things that are not really my business.

Worse even than your maddening song, your silence.