“Children were strangers you loved because you could love. If they gave back love when they were grown you were ahead of the game.”

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.

I work with language. I love the flowers of afterthought.

We have two lives, the life we learn with and the life we live with after that. Suffering is what brings us toward happiness.

There are no wrong books. What’s wrong is the fear of them.

What suffering has taught me is the uselessness of suffering.

Revision is one of the exquisite pleasures of writing.

Those who write about life, reflect about life. you see in others who you are.

The wild begins where you least expect it, one step off your normal course

… it’s possible to let love fly by like a cloud in a windy sky if one is too timid, or perhaps unable to believe he is entitled to good fortune.

Of course it would cost something, but he was an expert in cutting corners; and when there were no more corners left he would make circles rounder.

If you ever forget you are a Jew a goy will remind you.

I am somewhat of a meliorist. That is to say, I act as an optimist because I find I cannot act at all, as a pessimist.

(Clothes) cannot change a man’s nature. He’s either kind or he isn’t, with or without clothes.

I don’t believe there’s anything in life you can’t go back and fix.

One day, though, I realized I was no longer a believer, and realizing that, I couldn’t go back.

After a while I started to think of that as an image of something that went a lot deeper than the dead dog, which is you can’t bring back anything to life.

What I’ve learned about teaching is to refer back to the root of that word, which is educo, which means “to pull from.

For me, I find that even though I’ve accomplished a few things in my life, looking back on accomplishments doesn’t give me a sense of satisfaction.

How can I ever hope to communicate something to you unless I get signals back from you that I’m on the right track or that I’ve started at some place that you’re familiar with?

Someone said they saw you in Nepal a long time back. Tell me why you look away, don’t you have a word to say?

I’m more comfortable in a play. In film, there’s always a certain sense of control, of holding back.