Children were strangers you loved because you could love. If they gave back love when they were grown you were ahead of the game.

There is in the darkness a unity, if you will, that cannot be achieved in any other environment, a blending of self with what the self perceives, and exquisite mystical experience.

A man is an island in the only sense that matters, not an easy way to be. We live in mystery, a cosmos of separate lonely bodies, men, insects, stars. It is all loneliness and men know it best.

All men are Jews, though few men know it.

Completed, most lives were alike in stages of living-joys, celebrations, crises, illusions, losses, sorrows.

First drafts are for learning what your novel or story is about. Revision is working with that knowledge to enlarge and enhance an idea, to re-form it.... The first draft of a book is the most uncertain-where you need guts, the ability to accept the imperfect until it is better.

Prufrock had measured out his life with measuring spoons; Dubin, in books resurrecting the lives of others.