[ Contrasting writers in the United States and in Eastern Europe :] In my situation, everything goes and nothing matters; in their situation, nothing goes and everything matters.

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

All that we don’t know is astonishing. Even more astonishing is what passes for knowing.

I write fiction and I’m told it’s autobiography, I write autobiography and I’m told it’s fiction, so since I’m so dim and they’re so smart, let them decide what it is or it isn’t.

In Israel it’s enough to live—you don’t have to do anything else and you go to bed exhausted. Have you ever noticed that Jews shout? Even one ear is more than you need.

The first time I saw Brenda she asked me to hold her glasses.

Now vee may perhaps to begin. Yes?

[A] life of writing books is a trying adventure in which you cannot find out where you are unless you lose your way.

Writing the last page of a book was as close as he’d ever come to sublimity, and that hadn’t happened in four years.

World War III will be triggered off not by suppressed nationalists seeking political independence, as happened the first time around when the Serbs at Sarajevo shot the heir to the Austrian throne, but by some semiliterate, whacked-out ”loner“ who lobs a rocket into a nuclear arsenal in order to impress Brooke Shields.