'Haunted by the past' is a commonplace phrase because it's a commonplace experience. Even if one is not, strictly speaking, 'haunted', the past is perpetually with one in the present, and the longer it grows and the further it recedes the stronger its presence seems to become.

When I was a child... I was watching a snowstorm, and hopefully asked, 'Momma, do we believe in winter?'

This is what you know about someone you have to hate: he charges you with his crime and castigates himself in you.

Everyone becomes a part of history whether they like it or not and whether they know it or not.

To read a novel requires a certain kind of concentration, focus, devotion to the reading. If you read a novel in more than two weeks, you don't read the novel really.

I am the Raskolnikov of jerking off – the sticky evidence is everywhere!

Only in America, Rabbi Golden, do these peasants, our mothers, get their hair dyed platinum at the age of sixty, and walk up and down Collins Avenue in Florida in pedalpushers and mink stoles - and with opinions on every subject under the sun. It isn't their fault they were given a gift like speech - look, if cows could talk, they would say things just as idiotic.