… the world will indulge you just so long Asher Lev. Then it will stop. You will simply have to grow accustomed to that truth.

... an artist is a person first. He is an individual. If there is no person, there is no artist.

It is inconceivable to me that a million or three million or half a million human beings will think and feel precisely the same way on any single subject.

A writer is a strange instrument of our species, a harp of sorts, fine-tuned to the dark contradictions of life.

Something that is yours forever is never precious

I'm not altogether certain that a fundamentalism of necessity has to argue that it is the only reading of the human experience in order to stay alive.

In Russia I went to a great yeshiva, and in America I work in a carnival.