Only amateurs say that they write for their own amusement. Writing is not an amusing occupation. It is a combination of ditch-digging, mountain-climbing, treadmill and childbirth. Writing may be interesting, absorbing, exhilarating, racking, relieving. But amusing? Never!

People permit life to slide past them like a deft pickpocket, their purse-not yet missed and now too late-in his hand.

There is an interesting resemblance in the speeches of dictators, no matter what country they may hail from or what language they may speak.

A stricken tree, a living thing, so beautiful, so dignified, so admirable in its potential longevity, is, next to man, perhaps the most touching of wounded objects.

A story must simmer in its own juice for months or even years before it's ready to serve.

But I have felt that to be a Jew was, in some ways at least, to be especially privileged.

I think in order to write really well and convincingly, one must be somewhat poisoned by emotion, dislike, displeasure, resentment, fault-finding, imagination, passionate remonstrance, a sense of injustice-they all make fine fuel.