Actually we did not have the feelings we said we had until we spoke them--at least I didn't; to phrase them was to invent them and own them.

The question to ask about the writer isn't 'Why does he behave so badly?' but 'What does he gain by wearing this mask?

The secret to living in the rush of the world with a minimum of pain is to get as many people as possible to string along with your delusions; the trick to living alone up here, away from all agitating entanglements, allurements, and expectations, apart especially from one's own intensity, is to organize the silence, to think of its mountaintop plenitude as capital, silence as wealth exponentially increasing. The encircling silence as your chosen source of advantage and your only intimate.

Fear presides over these memories, a perpetual fear.Of course no childhood is without its terrors, yet I wonder if I would have been a less frightened boy if Lindbergh hadn't been president or if I hadn't been the offspring of Jews.

I'm an Obama supporter. And if you're an Obama supporter that means you had a hard time during the Bush years.

The only obsession everyone wants: 'love.' People think that in falling in love they make themselves whole? The Platonic union of souls? I think otherwise. I think you're whole before you begin. And the love fractures you. You're whole, and then you're cracked open.

You can't write good satirical fiction in America because reality will quickly outdo anything you might invent.