The cruelest thing anyone can do to Portnoy's Complaint is to read it twice.

The knowledge that makes us cherish innocence makes innocence unattainable.

The most glorious vision of the intellectual life is still that which is loosely called humanist: the idea of a mind committed yet dispassionate, ready to stand alone, curious, eager, skeptical. The banner of critical independence, ragged and torn though it may be, is still the best we have.

The cruelest thing anyone can do to Portnoy's Complaint is to read it twice.

Imagination is not something apart and hermetic, not a way of leaving reality behind; it is a way of engaging reality.

I was in a garden at the Rodin Museum. For a few minutes I was alone, sitting on a bench between two long hedges of roses. Pink roses. Suddenly I felt the most powerful feeling of peace, and I had the thought that death, if it means an absorption into a reality like the one that was before me, might be all right.

One great flaw in the reforming passion is that in its eagerness to remedy social wrongs it tends to neglect, certainly to undervalue, the experience of those whose lives it wishes to improve.