There’s something outrageously simple about extending yourself toward a goal the way a plant seeks the sun’s rays or a gopher the crunch of easy soil beneath his paws, and then getting exactly what you...

There’s no present left. This is the problem for a novelist. [The problem] is the present is gone. We’re all living in the future constantly . . . Back in the day Leo Tolstoy —...

I am born hungry. Ravenous. I want to eat the world, and I can never be satiated.

The world is harsh and inconsiderate, and you can rely only on your family.

I am a kind of joke, but the question is: which kind? My job is to keep everyone guessing.

In contravention of my belief that any life ending in death is essentially pointless, I needed my friends to open up that plastic bag and take one last look at me. Someone had to remember...

We know summer is the height of of being alive. We don’t believe in God or the prospect of an afterlife mostly, so we know that we’re only given eighty summers or so per lifetime,...

Every moment I have ever experienced as a child is as important as every moment I am experiencing now, or will experience ever. I guess what I’m saying is that not everybody should have children.

You could drown a kitten in her blue eyes.

I am scared of the photo studio. I am scared of the telephone. Scared of anything outside our apartment. Scared of the people in their big fur hats. Scared of the snow. Scared of the...

You are not what you want. You are what wants you back.

I wonder what children whose parents have money think about in their spare time.

We may not be a great power anymore, we may be into you for sixty-five trillion yuan-pegged, but we’re not afraid to use our troops if our spades act up, so watch out, or we’ll...

Reading is entering into the consciousness of another human being.

All love is socioeconomic. It’s the gradients in status that make arousal possible.

The truth is this: The rich will rule even at a place like Oberlin, where their kind is technically forbidden. They will simply invert the power structure to suit their needs. They will come out...

The humiliation of growing up a Jew in the Soviet Union, of cleaning piss-stained bathrooms in the States, of worshiping a country that would collapse as simply and inelegantly as the one he had abandoned.

Reading is difficult. People just aren’t meant to read anymore. We’re in a post-literate age. You know, a visual age. How many years after the fall of Rome did it take for a Dante to...

She was clothed entirely in two large swatches of leather, the leather fake and shiny in a self-mocking way, absolutely correct for 1993, the first year when mocking the mainstream had become the mainstream.

I write because there is nothing as joyful as writing, even when the writing is twisted and full of hate, the self-hate that makes writing not only possible but necessary. I hate myself, I hate...

The fading light is us, and we are, for a moment so brief (…) beautiful.

In the first few pages, Kundera discusses several abstract historical figures: Robespierre, Nietzsche, Hitler. For Eunice’s sake, I wanted him to get to the plot, to introduce actual “living” characters – I recalled this was...

Forget the fountain of youth, pal of mine. You can live to be a thousand, and it won’t matter. Mediocrities like you deserve immortality.

As every so-called creative spirit soon learns, the rest of the world doesn’t particularly give a damn.

Joshie has always told Post Human Services Staff to keep a diary, to remember who we were because every moment, our brains and synapses are being rebuilt and rewired with maddening disregard for our personalities,...

How can we read when people need our help? It’s a luxury. A stupid luxury.

These are all good things, I said. But no one knows where your country is or who you are. You don’t have a familiar ethnic cuisine; your diaspora , from what I understand, is mostly...

My hair would continue to gray, and then one day, it would fall out entirely, and then, on a day meaninglessly close to the present one, meaninglessly like the present one, I would disappear from...

And the looks on the faces of my countrymenpassive heads bent arms at their trousers everyone guilty of not being their best of not earning their daily bread the kind of docility I had never...

She folds the pages of the books she reads when she wants to remember something important. Her favorite books are accordions, testaments to an endless search for meaning.

The simple trill of her laugh has not declined over the years; if anything it’s been buffeted by her endless sorrows and disappointments.

È questo che ammiro nella gioventù italiana, il lento scemare delle ambizioni, la consapevolezza che il meglio è di gran lunga alle spalle.Noi americani abbiamo molto da imparare dal loro declino pieno di grazia.

After all, this is America, and you can swap out the parts of yourself that don’t work. You can rebuild yourself piece by piece.

I want to be loved so badly, it verges on mild insanity.

Michigan, with its delicious American name. How lucky one must be to live there.

The novel was set in an unspecified near future, because setting a novel in the present in a time of unprecedented technological and social dislocation seemed to me shortsighted…. To write a book set in...

In America, the distance between wanting something and having it delivered to your living room is not terribly great.

Let’s see if I can write about something other than my heart.

Maybe this is who I really am.Not a loner, exactly.But someone who can be alone.

We’re people of the Orient. We know everything. And what we don’t know, we can sense.