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

The writer is a writer because he cannot help it. It is a compulsion.

The ideal view for daily writing, hour for hour, is the blank brick wall of a cold-storage warehouse. Failing this, a stretch of sky will do, cloudless if possible.

You lose in the end unless you know how the wheel is fixed or can fix it yourself.

Opinion! If every one had so little tact as to give their true opinion when it was asked this would be a miserable world.

I think that in order to write really well and convincingly, one must be somewhat poisoned by emotion.

I sat staring up at a shelf in my workroom from which thirty-one books identically dressed in neat dark green leather stared back at me with a sort of cold hostility like children who resent their parents. Don't stare at us like that! they said. Don't blame us if we didn't turn out to be the perfection you expected. We didn't ask to be brought into the world.