“I don’t know that I want to settle there. I prefer the creative spur of exile. () But wherever I am I shall be Jewish, and that sound will inform every syllable I write.”

I am blessed with a long ancestry of wisdom, prophecy, and promise, a line of overwhelming creative achievements, courage, humor, and, above all, a dogged and chronic permanence, the greatest legacy of all.

[On being a judge for the 1986 Booker Prize:] I got to the point where I couldn’t read a laundry list without considering it for the Booker Prize.

Our historical bequest is sublime. I have inherited a fragmented but highly creative exile and, since 1948, a home.

If you’re a writer there will come at least one morning in your life when you wake up and want to kill your agent.

This is the most immediate fruit of exile, of uprooting: the prevalence of the unreal over the real.

Exile as a mode of genius no longer exists; in place of Joyce we have the fragments of work appearing in Index on Censorship.

The perpetuation of slavery, the exile and extermination of American Indians, and the passage of Jim Crow laws weren’t carried out at the bidding of a few malefactors of great wealth.

There being no shared daily life what with migrations, exiles, diasporas, rendings, the search for work. Or there is a shared daily life riddled with holes of silence

Were you indeed not blinded by the Curse Of Self-exile, that still grows worse and worse, Yourselves would know that, though you see him not, He is with you this Moment, on this Spot.

When some one reminded him that the people of Sinope had sentenced him to exile, he said, “And I sentenced them to stay at home.