And they'll vote for me because I'm the best liar, because I do it honestly, with a certain finesse. They know that lies and truth are very close, and that something beautiful rests between.

Accident is as much a part of fiction as anything else, symbolic of the grace that, along with will, conspires to put words on the page.

I am religious by nature, I'm not a nihilist. I don't follow, I don't even know what the tenets of things like deconstructionism are, and all those schools that come up and their way of looking at things that people strive to incorporate into what they write. I don't even know what they are. Because I sense from a distance that I don't want to know. And therefore even if I had no politics, actual politics, my cultural point of view is hopelessly out of date with the modern literary sensibility. Which is nihilistic, and ironic, detached, cool, and cowardly.

I believe that Israel is very likely not to survive, it's not going to last forever, and now there's nothing that someone like me can do about it, in that it's a threat of nuclear or biological or chemical attack.

To be mad is to feel with excruciating intensity the sadness and joy of a time which has not arrived or has already been.

No one ever said that you would live to see the repercussions of everything you do, or that you have guarantees, or that you are not obliged to wander in the dark, or that everything will be proved to you and neatly verified like something in science. Nothing is: at least nothing that is worthwhile.

He felt as if he were paying for the privilege of music with portions of his life and body. But it was well worth it.