“Anyone who goes into writing has to find out somewhere along the line, he’s either naïve or insane.”

“For an instant he was able to cross the line and understand this strange loyalty of Jew to Jew. Those Jews who lived free in England were only there due to some quirk of fate instead of Aushwitz and every Jew knew that genocide could have happened to his own family except for that quirk of fate.Yet, as time stood suspended, Gilray was all gentiles who never quite understood Jews. He could befriend them, work with them, but never totally understand them. He was all white men who could never quite understand black men and all black men who could never quite understand whites. He was all normal men who could tolerate or even defend homosexuals...but never fully understand them.There is in us all that line that prevents us from fully understanding those who are different. ”

“Who here wants to be a writer?' I asked. Everyone in the room raised his hand. 'Why the hell aren't you home writing?' I said, and left the stage.”

“Love can't mature in one room. It has to come out of the full sharing of everything: joys, aspirations, downfalls, all of it. That's the only real path to love.”

“This was what I came to found. The conquest of loneliness was the missing link that was one day going to make a decent novelist out of me. If you are out here and cannot close off the loves and hates of all that back there in the real world the memories will overtake you and swamp you and wilt your tenacity. Tenacity stamina... close off to everything and everyone but your writing. That s the bloody price. I don t know maybe it's some kind of ultimate selfishness. Maybe it's part of the killer instinct. Unless you can stash away and bury thoughts of your greatest love you cannot sustain the kind of concentration that breaks most men trying to write a book over a three or four year period.”

“Who is left in the ghetto is the one man in a thousand in any age, in any culture, who through some mysterious workings of force within his soul will stand in defiance against any master. He is that one human in a thousand whose indomitable spirit will not bow. He is the one man in a thousand whose indomitable spirit cannot bow. He is the one man in a thousand who will not walk quietly to Umschlagplatz. Watch out for him, Alfred Funk, we have pushed him to the wall.”

“I know writers have to be crazy. But more than that that, they have to get made and stay mad. If things don't make a writer mad, he'll end up writing Flopsy, Mopsy, and Cottantail.”