A writer is dreamed and transfigured into being by spells, wishes, goldfish, silhouettes of trees, boxes of fairy tales dropped in the mud, uncles' and cousins' books, tablets and capsules and powders...and then one day you find yourself leaning here, writing on that round glass table salvaged from the Park View Pharmacy--writing this, an impossibility, a summary of who you came to be where you are now, and where, God knows, is that?

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

The engineering is secondary to the vision.

We are so placid that the smallest tremor of objection is taken as a full-scale revolution.

What we remember from childhood we remember forever - permanent ghosts, stamped, inked, imprinted, eternally seen.

To be any sort of competent writer one must keep one's psychological distance from the supreme artists.

To imagine the unimaginable is the highest use of the imagination