Achilles only had an Achilles heel, I have an entire Achilles body.

There's no point in looking back, because there's nothing you can really do to improve the film. You can only aggravate and wish you had done stuff better.

I don't respond well to mellow, you know what I mean, I have a tendency to... if I get too mellow, I ripen and then rot.

I'm very old-fashioned. I believe that people should stay married for life, like pigeons and Catholics.

Pale, nervous girls with black-rimmed glasses and blunt-cut hair lolled around on sofas, riffling Penguin Classics provocatively. [...] But it wasn’t just intellectual experiences—they were peddling emotional ones, too. For fifty bucks, I learned, you could “relate without getting close.” For a hundred, a girl would lend you her Bartok records, have dinner, and then let you watch while she had an anxiety attack.

God, you Jews are truly exotic." Exotic? She should only know the Greenblatts. Or Mr. and Mrs. Milton Sharpstein, my father's friends. Or for that matter, my cousin Tovah. Exotic? I mean, they're nice, but hardly exotic with their endless bickering over the best way to combat indigestion or how far back to sit from the television set.

That’s one of the nice things about writing, or any art; if the thing’s real, it just lives.