Am I mistaken to think that even back then, in the vivid present, the fullness of life stirred our emotions to an extraordinary extent? Has anywhere since so engrossed you in its ocean of details?...

Don’t judge it. Just write it. Don’t judge it. It’s not for you to judge it.Interview in Esquire Magazine 10/10

You have a conscience, and a conscience is a valuable attribute, but not if it begins to make you think you were to blame for what is far beyond the scope of your responsibility.

Within five minutes of leaving the reunion, I’d undone the double wrapping and eaten all six rugelach, each a snail of sugar-dusted pastry dough, the cinnamon-lined chambers microscopically studded with midget raisins and chopped walnuts....

You take off your clothes and you’re in bed with somebody, and that is indeed where whatever you’ve concealed, your particularity, whatever it may be, however encrypted, is going to be found out, and that’s...

I understood that people are trying to transform themselves all the time: the universal urge to be otherwise. So as not to look as they look, sound as they sound, be treated as they are...

Conflicting stories continue to circulate concerning the death of the President. A second White House announcement has now called attention to the President’s schedule for the day, pointing out that no mention is made there...

Everybody who flashed the signs of loyalty he took to be loyal. Everybody who flashed the signs of intelligence he took to be intelligent. And so he had failed to see into his daughter, failed...

True, he had chosen to live alone, but not unbearably alone. The worst of being unbearably alone was that you had to bear it – either that or you were sunk. You had to work...

It’s human to have a secret, but it’s just as human to reveal it sooner or later.

The only obsession everyone wants: ‘love.’ People think that in falling in love they make themselves whole? The Platonic union of souls? I think otherwise. I think you’re whole before you begin. And the love...

You put too much stock in human intelligence, it doesn’t annihilate human nature.

These girls with old gents don’t do it despite the age—they’re drawn to the age, they do it for the age. Why? In Consuela’s case, because the vast difference in age gives her permission to...

Llega un momento, como me llegó a mí hace unos meses, en que se halla uno en tal estado de desamparo y confusión, que no logra comprender lo que otrora resultaba obvio: por qué hago...

One’s story isn’t a skin to be shed— it’s inescapable, one’s body and blood. You go on pumping it out till you die, the story veined with the themes of your life, the ever-recurring story...

A Jewish man with his parents alive is half the time a helpless infant!

Because that is when you love somebody – when you see them being game in the face of the worst. Not courageous. Not heroic. Just game.

There were two types of strong men: those like Uncle Monty and Abe Steinheim, remorseless about their making money, and those like my father, ruthlessly obedient to their idea of fair play.

a father for whom everything is an unshakable duty, for whom there is a right way and a wrong way and nothing in between, a father whose compound of ambitions, biases, and beliefs is so...

… and I experienced the bitter helplessness of a taunted old man dying to be whole again.

The tragedy of the man not set up for tragedy—that is every man’s tragedy.

It was not for me, after these last seventy-two hours, to reject as too outlandish the possibility that the situation for him here had driven George crazy. Yet I did reject it. It was just...

You tasted it. Isn’t that enough? Of what do you ever get more than a taste? That’s all we’re given in life, that’s all we’re given of life. A taste. There is no more.

In my childhood I led the life of a sage, when I grew up I started climbing trees

My God! The English language is a form of communication! Conversation isn’t just crossfire where you shoot and get shot at! Where you’ve got to duck for your life and aim to kill! Words aren’t...

Oh, to be a center fielder, a center fielder- and nothing more

Stunned by how little he’d gotten over her and she’d gotten over him, he walked away understanding, as outside his reading in classical Greek drama he’d never had to understood before, how easily life can...

All I can tell you with certainty is that I, for one, have no self, and that I am unwilling or unable to perpetrate upon myself the joke of a self…. What I have instead...

You fight your superficiality, your shallowness, so as to try to come at people without unreal expectations, without an overload of bias or hope or arrogance, as untanklike as you can be, sans cannon and...

How much time could you spend staring out the ocean, even if it was the ocean you’d loved since you were a boy?

Where everything is words, you’d think I’d have some mastery and know my way around, but all this churning hatred, each man a verbal firing squad, immeasurable suspicions, a flood of mocking, angry talk, all...

Il s’avança un fauteuil, s’installa entre sa femme et sa mère et, tandis que Dawn parlait, il lui prit la main. Il y a cent façons de prendre la main de quelqu’un. Selon que c’est...

Everything dictated silence and self-control but I couldn’t restrain myself and spoke my mind.

Lo malo de la vida es que no sabes realmente si es un proceso descendente, no sabes en absoluto de qué se trata.

Life is just a short period of time in which you are alive.

What had happened in these ten years for there suddenly be so much to say — so much so pressing that it couldn’t wait to be said? Everywhere I walked, somebody was approaching me talking...

And since we don’t just forget things because they don’t matter but also forget things because they matter too much because each of us remembers and forgets in a pattern whose labyrinthine windings are an...

La poseuse de bombe présumée est décrite comme intelligente et douée mais d’un caractère têtu.

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

I turn sentences around. That’s my life. I write a sentence and then I turn it around. Then I look at it and I turn it around again. Then I have lunch. Then I come...

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

Alvin didn’t cry, didn’t curse, didn’t holler…. He was too far gone to roar on that day or even to crack. Only I did…. Only I cracked, alone, later in the one place in our...

Chaque fois que je levais les yeux je voyais mon petit ami complètement gaga parce que j’étais une reine de beauté à la noix! T’étais un vrai gosse! Il a fallu que tu me transformes...

Come se nel cuore della natura di uno scrittore ci fosse la purezza. Il cielo aiuti un simile scrittore! Come se Joyce non avesse annusato oscenamente le mutande di Nora. Come se nell’anima di Dostoevskij...

That can happen when people die, the argument with them drops away and people so flawed while they were drawing breath that at times they were all but unbearable now assert themselves in the most...

In my parents’ day and age, it used to be the person who fell short. Now it’s the discipline. Reading the classics is too difficult, therefore it’s the classics that are to blame. Today the...

Every man’s endeavor was imbued with responsibility

La fente, comme tracée au tire-ligne, cette superbe couture rabattue, qui s’épanouira un jour en pétales et, au fil du temps, deviendra le con de la femme, un pliage d’origami.

Writting turns you into somebody who’s always wrong. The illusion that you may get ir right someday is the perversity that draws you on. What else could? As pathological phenomena go, it doesn’t completely wreck...

This kindly unjudging judgment of the Swede could well have been a new development in Jerry, compassion a few hours old. That can happen when people die–the argument with them drops away and people so...