“What suffering has taught me is the uselessness of suffering.”

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.

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.

Revision is one of the exquisite pleasures of writing.

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

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 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.

There was one moment when I was in L.A., and he was teaching me a move. I just looked at him, thinking, ‘Oh my God, I’m being taught to wrestle by Dwayne Johnson. What the hell?’

Children are nowhere taught, in any systematic way, to distinguish true from false, or meaningful from meaningless, statements. Why is this so? Because their elders, even in the democratic countries, do not want them to be given this kind of education.

I pray for you every night. You’ve taught me to feel confident in myself, believe in myself that I can do it when I didn’t think I could do it.

I asked a girl who came from America to England, when I was only English, and she admitted she had been to a drama school. And I said, “What did they teach you?” And she said, “They taught me to be a candle burning in an empty room.”

My father was a great example of a strong and good man and Christian man, and my mother taught all my six sisters how to be young ladies and mothers and how to take care of your family. And so I think they were – they still are – great examples for all of us to their kids and to the world, too.

My opinion about basketball, the way I was taught, was when you step on the court, you play to win.

My mom and dad always taught acting, so instead of getting me babysitters, they would just bring me to class.

I went out into the world when I was about 22. I wrote books and I illustrated books and did book covers, and I taught tap-dancing, and I was a model in the art school. I had no ability for any of those things, but what else could I do?