The incessant perpetuation of collective fantasies makes people crave the truth and nothing but the truth - reality is the fastest American commodity.

Projecting yourself until everything is talking about you is, of course, a self-flattering form of self-pity

God knows our despair. God wants His chosen people to live in peace. God loves life, cares less about death. We need to live. I want to live, I want my children to live. Everyone I know wants to live. You have to ask yourself what is more important to you, life is death. What is this world about - life or death?

It is so much easier to deal with the dead than with the living. The dead are out of the way, merely characters from stories about the past, never again unreadable, no misunderstandings possible, the pain coming from them stable and manageable. nor do you have to explain yourself to them, to justify the fact of your life.

It was always clear to me that I would have to earn my readers, some I would have to find, some to create.

There are moments in life when it is all turned inside out--what is real becomes unreal, what is unreal becomes tangible, and all your levelheaded efforts to keep a tight ontological control are rendered silly and indulgent.

Cliché activates the comfortable mental laziness, we sort of revert to the domain of the already-familiar, what we have already imagined so that it doesn't seem that bad.