The more you lose, the more is to be lost, yet it matters less.

The privilege of a middle-class, stable, bourgeois life is that you can pretend that you are not complicated and project yourself as a solid, uncomplicated person, with refined life goals and achievements.

I don't know the numbers, but roughly half of the people who came through Ellis Island returned home. They came here to make money, not to make history.

Whatever solidarity I have established with other writers individually, it is usually organized around books. We connected as readers, as it were, not writers.

My skin was the border between the world and me.

You don't want your neurosurgeon to have doubts about the meaning of it all while he or she is operating on your brain.

Belief and delusion are incestuous siblings.