“I felt overstuffed and dull and disappointed, the way I always do the day after Christmas.”

There is something demoralizing about watching two people get more and more crazy about each other, especially when you are the only extra person in the room.

The silence depressed me. It wasn’t the silence of silence. It was my own silence.

And by the way, everything in life is writable about if you have the outgoing guts to do it, and the imagination to improvise. The worst enemy to creativity is self-doubt.

I am what I feel and think and do.

Tomorrow is another day toward death.

We should meet in another life, we should meet in air, me and you.

I want to write because I have the urge to excel in one medium of translation and expression of life.

I desire the things that will destroy me in the end.

Hour by hour, day by day, life becomes possible.

There is a certain unique and strange delight about walking down an empty street alone.

I love life. But it is hard and I have so much, so very much to learn.

The truth comes to me. The truth loves me.

She stared at her reflection in the glossed shop windows as if to make sure, moment by moment, that she continued to exist.

It’s a hell of a responsibility to be yourself. It’s much easier to be somebody else or nobody at all.

If the body is a temple, then tattoos are its stained glass windows.

The constant struggle in mature life, I think, is to accept the necessity of tragedy and conflict, and not to try to escape to some falsely simple solution which does not include these more somber complexities.

Criticism can never instruct or benefit you. Its chief effect is that of a telegram with dubious news. Praise leaves no glow behind, for it is a writer’s habit to remember nothing good of himself.

And whether these poor people would not fare far better if they were entrusted to the devils in Hell than they do at the hands of the devils of the New World who masquerade as Christians.

For a Jewish guy, I’ve recorded a lot of Christmas albums.

Nothing’s as mean as giving a little child something useful for Christmas.

At this time of year it’s easy to forget the true meaning of Christianity – the lies, the corruption, the abuse.

Next to a circus there ain’t nothing that packs up and tears out faster than the Christmas spirit.

Everybody loves a good Christmas song if you do it right.

A Clinical Study. Taking some time to read each night really taught me how to feign narcolepsy when my husband asked me what my “plan” was for taking down the Christmas tree.