The span of a man's life - that is nothing. But what a man makes of that span - that is something. A man must make his own meaning for life. Meaning is not automatically given to life.

No one knows he is fortunate until he becomes unfortunate, that's the way the world is.

Each generation thinks it fights new battles. But the battles are the same. Only the people are different.

I think most serious writers, certainly in the modern period, use their own lives or the lives of people close to them or lives they have heard about as the raw material for their creativity.

I'm constantly revising. Once the book is written and typed, I go through the entire draft again.

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

I will go wherever the truth leads me. It is secular scholarship, Rebbe; it is not the scholarship of tradition. In secular scholarship there are no boundaries and no permanently fixed views.” Lurie, if the Torah cannot go out into your world of scholarship and return stronger, then we are all fools and charlatans. I have faith in the Torah. I am not afraid of truth.