“I love metaphor. It provides two loaves where there seems to be one. Sometimes it throws in a load of fish.”

You could not pity anything if you weren’t a man; pity was a surprise to God. It was not his invention.

Completed, most lives were alike in stages of living-joys, celebrations, crises, illusions, losses, sorrows.

The first draft of a book is the most uncertain-where you need guts, the ability to accept the imperfect until it is better.

You write by sitting down and writing. There’s no particular time or place—you suit yourself, your nature.

I don’t think you can do anything for anyone without giving up something of your own.

Comedy, I imagine, is harder to do consistently than tragedy, but I like it spiced in the wine of sadness.

The purpose of freedom is to create it for others.

Some men are by nature explorers; my nature is to stay under the same moon and stars, and if the weather is wet, under the same roof. It’s a strange world, why make it stranger?

There comes a time in a man’s life when to get where he has to go – if there are no doors or windows he walks through a wall.

How one works, assuming he’s disciplined, doesn’t matter.

Overnight business could go down enough to hurt; yet as a rule it slowly recovered-sometimes it seemed to take forever-went up, not high enough to be really up, only not down.

You see in others who you are.

It was all those biographies in me yelling, ‘We want out. We want to tell you what we’ve done to you.’

The idea is to get the pencil moving quickly.

To any writer: Teach yourself to work in uncertainty. Many writers are anxious when they begin, or try something new.

No use fanning up hot coals when you have to walk across them.

One metaphor for how we are living is that you see so may people with cell phones.

It’s also easy to look at them as a metaphor for a shadow organization that says one thing and has a completely different agenda on their mind, and anybody who gets in their way, they just get rid of them. Does that sound familiar?

I’ll buy metaphor, but simile’s a cop-out used by scaredycats who won’t commit to anything. Simile’s for cowards.

It’s easy to look at the vampires as a metaphor for any feared or misunderstood group.

The sea is an idiom I cannot decipher.

Censorship is the mother of metaphor.

The Holocaust is a central event in many people’s lives, but it also has become a metaphor for our century. There cannot be an end to speaking and writing about it. Besides, in Israel, everyone carries a biography deep inside him.

I am not writing in metaphors. I am writing about catastrophes.