Like all enjoyable things, you see, it has unenjoyable parts to it.

A writer has to be driven crazy to help him to see. A writer needs his poisons.

Everybody has a hard job. All real work is hard. My work happened also to be undoable. Morning after morning for 50 years, I faced the next page defenseless and unprepared. Writing for me was a feat of self-preservation. If I did not do it, I would die. So I did it. Obstinacy, not talent, saved my life.

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

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.

There were many hours when I never quite know how I'd gotten there or why I stayed.

The signore...wishes her to begin at the beginning.