I was a biography in constant motion, memory to the marrow of my bones.
This is what you know about someone you have to hate: he charges you with his crime and castigates himself in you.
Religion was a lie that he had recognized early in life, and he found all religions offensive, considered their superstitious folderol meaningless, childish, couldn't stand the complete unadultness —...
Great artists, as history reveals, have been harshly persecuted time and again by the frightened and ill-educated,
Rimane il fatto che, in ogni modo, capire bene la gente non è vivere. Vivere è capirla male, capirla male e male e poi male e, dopo un attento riesame, ancora male. Ecco come sappiamo di essere vivi:...
It was puzzling to own trees - they were not owned the way a business os owned or even a house is owned. If anything, they were held in trust. In trust. Yes, for all of posterity,...
Where was the Jew in him? You couldn't find it and yet you knew it was there. Where was the irrationality in him? Where was the crybaby in him? Where were the wayward temptations? No guile. No artific...
You can no more make someone tell the truth than you can force someone to love you.
yEvery man's endeavor was imbued with responsibility
No matter how much you know, no matter how much you think, no matter how much you plot and you connive and you plan, you're not superior to sex. It's a very risky game. A man wouldn't have two-thirds...
Too late, but I understand. That we don't perish of understanding everything too late, that is a miracle. But we do perish of that -- of just that.
I finally went back to my seat in the second row and sat there doing what I've done throughout my professional life: I tried to think, first, how to make credible a somewhat extreme, if not outright r...
The fact remains that getting people right is not what living is all about anyway. It's getting them wrong and wrong and wrong and then, on careful reconsideration, getting them wrong again. That's ho...
That people were manifold creatures didn't come as a surprise to the Swede, even if it was a bit of a shock to realize it anew when someone let you down. What was astonishing to him was how people see...
I turn sentences around. That's my life. I write a sentence and then I turn it around. Then I look at it and turn it around again...
How easy life is when it's easy, and how hard when it's hard.
Spring me from this role I play of the smothered son in the Jewish joke! Because it's beginning to pall a little at thirty-three!
You put too much stock in human intelligence, it doesn't annihilate human nature.
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 s...
All this, this luck – what did it mean? Coming so suddenly, and on such a scale, it was as baffling as a misfortune.
Showing 41 to 60 of 289 results