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

What we think we are surely going to do, we don't do; and what we never intended to do, we may one day notice that we have done, and done, and done.

Time heals all things but one: Time.

We were born to die; we were born to endure, on the way to death, sorrow-sorrow in manifold shapes.

I read in order to write. I read out of obsession with writing.

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

Novels are routinely denigrated when characters are not found to be likable. Is Raskolnikov likable? Is King Lear? The plethora of such naive readers testifies to a failure of imagination - the capacity to see into unfamiliar lives, motives, feelings - and this failure must, at least in part, be the failure of the teaching of literature in the schools.