For darkness restores what light cannot repair.
Life – the way it really is – is a battle not between good and bad, but between bad and worse.
In the business of writing, what one accumulates is not experience but uncertainties.
How delightful to find a friend in everyone.
Geography blended with time equals destiny.
The eye identifies itself not with the body it belongs to but with the object of its attention.
Poetry is what is gained in translation.
Cherish your human connections: your relationships with friends and family. Even your super weirdo creep cousin.
As long as the state permits itself to interfere in the affairs of literature, literature has the right to interfere with the affairs of state.
Perhaps the best proof of the Almighty’s existence is that we never know when we are to die.
Every life has a file, if you will.
The fact that we are living does not mean we are not sick.
Russian talk of political evil is as natural as eating...
I had this fantasy of becoming a neurosurgeon. You know, the normal Jewish boy fantasy, but I wanted to be a neurosurgeon for some reason. So I started in this unpleasant way. I was an assistant to the coroner, opening up corpses, taking the innards out, opening skulls, taking the brains out.
On the whole, love comes with the speed of light; separation, with that of sound.
After all, it is hard to master both life and work equally well. So if you are bound to fake one of them, it had better be life.
When I’m not writing or reading, I’m thinking about both.
The government, the state, they’re just objects of jokes rather than serious consideration. I can’t possibly take them seriously.
This is the generation whose first cry of life was the Hungarian uprising.
I got caught up in the proletariat the way Marx describes it.