To be human is to be in the tense condition of a death-foreseeing, consciously libidinous animal. No other earthly creature suffers such a capacity for thought, such a complexity of envisioned but frustrated possibilities, such a troubling ability to question the tribal and biological imperatives.

Russia is the only country of the world you can be homesick for while you're still in it.

America is a vast conspiracy to make you happy.

My mother didn't raise me to be a critic, but I seem to have become one anyway.

The world keeps ending but new people too dumb to know it keep showing up as if the fun's just started.

There's a crystallization that goes on in a poem which the young man can bring off, but which the middle-aged man can't.

Movies took you right up to the edge but kept you safe.