The Jewish people have been in exile for 2,000 years; they have lived in hundreds of countries, spoken hundreds of languages and still they kept their old language, Hebrew. They kept their Aramaic, later their Yiddish; they kept their books; they kept their faith.

What's the good of not believing? Today it's your wife you don't believe; tomorrow it's God Himself you won't take stock in.

No matter how much you know a human being, you don't know him enough.

There must be a way for man to attain all possible pleasures, all the powers and knowledge that nature can grant him, and still serve God--a God who speaks in deeds, not in words, and whose vocabulary is the Cosmos.

The characters have their own lives and their own logic, and you have to act accordingly.

Two important things are to have a genuine interest in people and to be kind to them. Kindness, I've discovered, is everything.

There are 500 reasons I write for children.... Children read books, not reviews. They don't give a hoot about the critics.... They don't read to free themselves of guilt, to quench their thirst for rebellion, or to get rid of alienation. They still believe in God, the family, angels, devils, witches, goblins, logic, clarity, punctuation, and other such obsolete stuff.... They don't expect their beloved writer to redeem humanity. Young as they are, they know that it is not in his power. Only the adults have such childish illusions.