For a Russian to be chivalrous with an American is a spiritual impossibility, a conradiction in terms.

I still catch myself feeling sad about things that don’t matter anymore.

I never asked to be born in the first place.

There is a strong feeling in the Middle West that the artist is not pulling his own weight no matter how hard he may work, that the other people are doing the real stuff.

I had made her so unhappy that she had developed a sense of humor. [-Rabo Karabekian]

The arts are not a way to make a living. They are a very human way of making life more bearable.

I think I succeeded as a writer because I did not come out of an English department. I used to write in the chemistry department. And I wrote some good stuff. If I had been in the English department, the prof would have looked at my short stories, congratulated me on my talent, and then showed me how Joyce or Hemingway handled the same elements of the short story. The prof would have placed me in competition with the greatest writers of all time, and that would have ended my writing career.