There is in my work a very strong religious foreground and background. In the later work some of that tends to diminish, but it's certainly present in the early work.

In other words, Judaism is not Calvinism.

I think the hardest part of writing is revising. And by that I mean the following: A novelist has to create the piece of marble and then chip away to find the figure in it.

I don't work on my Sabbath. I write five-and-a-half or six days a week.

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.

Art is whether or not there is a scream in him wanting to get out in a special way.