Nothing is so awesomely unfamiliar as the familiar that discloses itself at the end of a journey. Nothing shakes the heart so much as meeting-far, far away-what you last met at home.

Language makes culture, and we make a rotten culture when we abuse words.

Life is that which - pressingly, persistently, unfailingly, imperially - interrupts.

In books, as in life, there are no second chances. On second thought: its the next work, still to be written, that offers the second chance.

All politicians know that every 'temporary' political initiative promised as a short-term poultice stays on the books forever.

The secular Jew is a figment; when a Jew becomes a secular person he is no longer a Jew.

Women who write with an overriding consciousness that they write as women are engaged not in aspiration toward writing, but chiefly in a politics of sex.