I should prefer to die laughing, and, on more than one occasion, thought I might.

I just know so many people who have six or seven foreign languages and have read everything and have musical training and they are still dorks

All men and women are born, live, suffer and die; what distinguishes us one from another is our dreams, whether they be dreams about worldly or unworldly things, and what we do to make them come about... We do not choose to be born. We do not choose our parents. We do not choose our historical epoch, the country of our birth, or the immediate circumstances of our upbringing. We do not, most of us, choose to die; nor do we choose the time and conditions of our death. But within this realm of choicelessness, we do choose how we live.

I am afraid I am one of those people who continues to read in the hope of sometime discovering in a book a single—and singular—piece of wisdom so penetrating, so soul stirring, so utterly applicable to my own life as to make all the bad books I have read seem well worth the countless hours spent on them. My guess is that this wisdom, if it ever arrives, will do so in the form of a generalization.

I am basically a complainer and all the grounds for complaint have been swept out from under me.

My wife who is non-Jewish regrets it all the time that I can say these terrible things about fellow Jews and she can't.

Of the seven deadly sins, only envy is no fun at all.