Often it's true that films just go right through us. You see the film, you might be entertained, and if it's not a great film, it loses its power very quickly. I think even simply acceptable books stay with us a lot longer.

Nobody asks you to do this. The world out there is not panting after another novelist. We choose it

All men contain several men inside them, and most of us bounce from one self to another without ever knowing who we are.

[Charles] Reznikoff was in between faiths, in between worlds... a double, hyphenated American. I think it probably goes deeper than that.

What matters is not how well you can avoid trouble, but how you cope with trouble when it comes.

Writing makes you feel that there is a reason to go on living. If I couldn't write, I would stop breathing.

In the end, the art of hunger can be described as an existential art. It is a way of looking death in the face, and by death I mean death as we live it today: without God, without hope of salvation. Death as the abrupt and absurd end of life