“One cannot and must not try to erase the past merely because it does not fit the present.”

Women’s liberation is just a lot of foolishness. It’s men who are discriminated against. They can’t bear children. And no one is likely to do anything about that.

Above all, this country is our own. Nobody has to get up in the morning and worry what his neighbors think of him. Being a Jew is no problem here.

It is always much easier, I have discovered, to make people cry or gasp than to make them think.

I never did anything alone. Whatever was accomplished in this country was accomplished collectively.

Israel itself is the strongest guarantee against another Holocaust.

The public history of modern art is the story of conventional people not knowing what they are dealing with.

Don’t be humble… you’re not that great.

Anybody who believes in something without reservation believes that this thing is right and should be, has the stamina to meet obstacles and overcome them.

The deserts of the Middle East are in need of water, not bombers.

We don’t want wars even when we win.

From Russia I didn’t bring out a single happy memory, only sad, tragic ones. The nightmare of pogroms, the brutality of Cossacks charging young Socialists, fear, shrieks of terror.

As President Nixon says, presidents can do almost anything, and President Nixon has done many things that nobody would have thought of doing.

Old age is like a plane flying through a storm. Once you’re aboard, there’s nothing you can do.

Show me a sensible person who likes himself or herself! I know myself too well to like what I see. I know but too well that I’m not what I’d like to be.

The modern woman asks herself: Is there something wrong with me if my children don’t fill up my life?

Pessimism is a luxury that a Jew can never allow himself.

Music, at its essence, is what gives us memories. And the longer a song has existed in our lives, the more memories we have of it.

The true art of memory is the art of attention.

All my summer memories sparkle in riverbed reflections.

I generally have a real strong idea or a strong punchline, and I just try to get to it by rambling around, as I don’t like to memorize words.

Memory, I realize, can be an unreliable thing; often it is heavily coloured by the circumstances in which one remembers.

She refused to let what hurts bruise her memories.

All good novelists have bad memories.

I like the fact that by mimicking the way memory works, a writer can actually write in a fluid way – one solid scene doesn’t have to fall on another solid scene, you can just have a fragment that then dovetails into another one that took place 30 years apart from it.