“New York waiters, probably the surliest in the Western world . . . are better images of their city than that journalistic favorite the taxi driver.”

As an absolute right something few other inhabitants can expect as a special privilege – then the result is likely to be spontaneous outbreaks of anti-Semitism.

I have done almost every human activity inside a taxi which does not require main drainage.

The country is laid out in a haphazard, sloppy fashion, offensive to the tidy, organized mind.

When ordinary Soviet citizens are told that a vital trade agreement awarding their country most-favoured-nation status with the US is being blocked in Congress because Soviet Jews are demanding.

You can never win as a sight-seer. Somebody else, more often than not the first person you meet when you get back home, has been there before you.

One has two duties – to be worried and not to be worried.

In my dreams I hear again the crash of guns, the rattle of musketry, the strange, mournful mutter of the battlefield.

It doesn’t matter if you come from the inner city. People who fail in life are people who find lots of excuses. It’s never too late for a person to recognize that they have potential in themselves.

You are in the country where you make up the rules, the laws. You are both dictator and obedient populace. It is a country nobody has ever explored before. It is up to you to make the maps, to build the cities.

Sadie,” he said forlornly, “when you become a parent, you may understand this. One of my hardest jobs as a father, one of my greatest duties, was to realize that my own dreams, my own goals and wishes, are secondary to my children’s.

Everybody. No matter how they feel about me, everybody on Oklahoma City, on that team, of course I watch them. I support them. I want them to do well.

We say that the sun is behind the clouds, but actually it is not the sun but the city from which we view it that is behind the clouds. If we realized that the sun is never behind the clouds we might have a different attitude toward the whole thing.

The city that is devoured by locusts each day and spat out each night. Third, there is the New York of the person who was born somewhere else and came to New York in quest of something.