Nothing lasts and yet nothing passes either, and nothing passes just because nothing lasts.

I cannot and do not live in the world of discretion, not as a writer, anyway. I would prefer to, I assure you - it would make life easier. But discretion is, unfortunately, not for novelists.

Old age isn't a battle; old age is a massacre.

A Jew without Jews, without Judaism, without Zionism, without Jewishness, without a temple or an army or even a pistol, a Jew clearly without a home, just the object itself, like a glass or an apple.

'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.

I am marked like a road map from head to toe with my repressions. You can travel the length and breadth of my body over superhighways of shame and inhibition and fear.

I kept waiting for him to lay bare something more than this pointed unobjectionableness, but all that rose to the surface was more surface