If they had wanted to punish me, they should have kept me in a communal apartment. Then I would have become a wreck.

Snobbery? But it's only a form of despair.

I'm 100 percent Jewish by blood, but by education I'm nothing. By affiliation I'm nothing.

I don't want to dive into that mud slide, which is what I consider the literary process.

What I like about cities is that everything is king size, the beauty and the ugliness.

As to the state, from my point of view, the measure of a writer's patriotism is not oaths from a high platform, but how he writes in the language of the people among whom he lives .

Love itself is the most elitist of passions. It acquires its stereoscopic substance and perspective only in the context of culture, for it takes up more place in the mind than it does in bed. Outside of that setting it falls flat into one-dimensional fiction.