“All men are Jews, though few men know it.”

It’s one thing for a man not to know, not to have learned; it’s another not to be able to live by what one does know.

If your train’s on the wrong track every station you come to is the wrong station.

We can’t all be friends and relatives as the world is; most of us have to be strangers.

There is in the darkness a unity, if you will, that cannot be achieved in any other environment, a blending of self with what the self perceives, and exquisite mystical experience.

Writing is a mode of being. If I write I live.

In my dreams I ate and I ate my dreams.

Prufrock had measured out his life with measuring spoons; Dubin, in books resurrecting the lives of others.

For misery don’t blame God. He gives the food but we cook it.

Tomorrow the world is not the same as today, though God listens with the same ear.

Nationality isn’t soul.

A man is an island in the only sense that matters, not an easy way to be. We live in mystery, a cosmos of separate lonely bodies, men, insects, stars. It is all loneliness and men know it best.

First drafts are for learning what your novel or story is about. Revision is working with that knowledge to enlarge and enhance an idea, to re-form it….

The whole history of baseball has the quality of mythology.

Ithink Isaid’All menare Jews excepttheydon’t know it.’I doubt I expected anyone to take the statement literally. But I think it’s an understandable statement and a metaphoric way of indicating how history, sooner or later, treats all men.

Somewhere I put it this way: first drafts are for learning what one’s fiction wants him to say. Revision works with that knowledge to enlarge and enhance an idea, to reform it. Revision is one of the exquisite pleasures of writing.

The past exudes legend: one can’t make pure clay of time’s mud.

He prayed on Fridays with the Muslims, on Saturdays with the Jews and on Sundays with the Christians. ‘

More than the Jews have kept Shabbat, Shabbat has kept the Jews.

Your time will come to follow me Jew

By pagans the Jews (and later Christians) were seen as perverse.

For me, why would a Jew want to go anywhere in history ever? I’m only going to have to run.

We’ve only recently turned the corner on the Sept. 11 attacks being blamed on Jews and Israelis, as well as almost every other terrorist attack, whether in London, Madrid, Bali or Egypt.

Women and Men, Christians and Jews, Muslims and Buddhists, white, black, red, brown.

The official Hamas charter calls for the murder of Jews and destruction of the Jewish state.