“Here’s what I love: when a great writer turns me into a Jew from Chicago, a lesbian out of South Carolina, or a black woman moving into a subway entrance in Harlem. Turn me into something else, writers of the world. Make me Muslim, heretic, hermaphrodite.”

Losing prepares you for the heartbreak, setback, and the tragedy that you will encounter in the world more than winning ever can. By licking your wounds you learn how to avoid getting wounded the next time.

Laughter is the only strategy that has ever worked at all for me when my world is falling apart.

Why do they not teach you that time is a finger snap and an eye blink, and that you should not allow a moment to pass you by without taking joyous, ecstatic note of it, not wasting a single moment of its swift, breakneck circuit?

It did not look like the work of God, but it might have represented the handicraft of a God with a joyous sense of humor, a dancing God who loved mischief as much as prayer, and playfulness as much as mischief.

The most powerful words in English are ‘Tell me a story,’ words that are intimately related to the complexity of history, the origins of language, the continuity of the species, the taproot of our humanity, our singularity, and art itself.

Rape is a crime against sleep and memory; it’s afterimage imprints itself like an irreversible negative from the camera obscura of dreams.

Carolina beach music,” Dupree said, coming up on the porch. “The holiest sound on earth.

But no one walks out of his family without reprisals: a family is too disciplined an army to offer compassion to its deserters.

I had come to a place where I was meant to be. I don’t mean anything so prosaic as a sense of coming home. This was different, very different. It was like arriving at a place much safer than home.

The English language on her tongue became a smoke-screen, without her eyes changing expression in the least.

There is such a thing as too much beauty in a woman and it is often a burden as crippling as homeliness and far more dangerous. It takes much luck and integrity to survive the gift of perfect beauty, and its impermanence is its most cunning betrayal.

No story is a straight line. The geometry of a human life is too imperfect and complex, too distorted by the laughter of time and the bewildering intricacies of fate to admit the straight line into its system of laws.

I could bear the memory, but I could not bear the music that made the memory such a killing thing.

There are no ideas in the South, just barbecue.

I loved my parents… but that can never change the fact that my father’s violence ruined my childhood.

Her library would have been valuable to a bibliophile except she treated her books execrably. I would rarely open a volume that she had not desecrated by underlining her favorite sections with a ball-point pen.

There is no greater compliment to the Jews than the fact that the degree of their unpopularity is always the scientific measure of the cruelty and silliness of the regime under which they live.

When you come to Germany as a Jew you have an uneasy feeling, but I’ve always felt okay in Berlin.

Some would say certain of these refer to the stereotypical, or ‘stage’ Jew. But objectively speaking, the only crime in humor is an unfunny joke.

I don’t ask employers, for example, to like blacks or Jews or native people.

If Jews want to get it on, tell them to pin their yarmulkes back and come over to my house.

A lot of that we see today, where the Muslims are against the Christians and the Christians are against Jews and the Jews are against Arabs – I mean, it just it goes on and on and on.

The only reason that Jews are in pornography is that we think that Christ sucks. Catholicism sucks.

We have no problems with Jews and highly respect Judaism as a holy religion.