literature is an instrument of a culture, not a summary of it.

It is useless either to hate or to love truth - but it should be noticed.

We are so placid that the smallest tremor of objection to anything at all is taken as a full-scale revolution. Should any soul speak up in favor of the obvious, it is taken as a symptom of the influence of the left, the right, the pink, the black, the dangerous. An idea for its own sake - especially an obvious idea - has no respectability.

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

Comedy springs from the ludicrous; but the ludicrous is stuck in the muck of reality, resolutely hostile to what is impossible.

Two things remain irretrievable: time and a first impression.

I measure my life in sentences pressed out, line by line, like the lustrous ooze on the underside of the snail, the snail's secret open seam, its wound, leaking attar.