I shall never send for a priest or recite an Act of Contrition in my last moments. I do not mind if I lose my soul for all eternity. If the kind of God exists Who would damn me for not working out a deal with Him, then that is unfortunate. I should not care to spend eternity in the company of such a person.

As soon as you become a writer, you lose contact with ordinary experience or tend to. ... the worst fate of a writer is to become a writer.

it's easier to forgive your enemies than to forgive your friends.

On the wall of our life together hung a gun waiting to be fired in the final act.

Every age has a keyhole to which its eye is pasted.

it came to me, as we sat there, glumly ordering lunch, that for extremely stupid people anti-Semitism was a form of intellectuality, the sole form of intellectuality of which they were capable. It represented, in a rudimentary way, the ability to make categories, to generalize.

You can date the evolving life of a mind, like the age of a tree, by the rings of friendship formed by the expanding central trunk.