"Unix was built for me. I didn't build it as an operating system for other people, I built it to do games, and to do my stuff. I was always into games, games was my thing. I used to play pinball machines, and I would pick the lock in the back of pinball machines. Then I'd study the diagrams that I had. That's where I learned a lot of this kind of logic."

"When in doubt, use brute force."

"The energy of American Jewish writers was so charged, so buoyant, that for a time they appeared to dominate American fiction. But there was so little Jewish energy in this art that one could invent parlor games over the ethnic or religious identity of its authors: Edna Ferber? Waldo Frank? Lillian Hellman? Nathanael West? Norman Mailer? E. L. Doctorow?"

"Murders are exciting and lift people into a heart-beating awe as religion is supposed to do, after seeing one in the street young couples will go back to bed and make love, people will cross themselves and thank God for the gift of their stuporous lives, old folks will talk to each other over cups of hot water with lemon because murders are enlivened sermons to be analyzed and considered and relished, they speak to the timid of the dangers of rebellion, murders are perceived as momentary descents of God and so provide joy and hope and righteous satisfaction to parishioners, who will talk about them for years afterward to anyone who will listen."

"Writing is a socially acceptable form of schizophrenia."

"The historian will tell you what happened. The novelist will tell you what it felt like."

"Like art and politics, gangsterism is a very important avenue of assimilation into society."

"You can’t remember sex. You can remember the fact of it, and recall the setting, and even the details, but the sex of the sex cannot be remembered, the substantive truth of it, it is by nature self-erasing, you can remember its anatomy and be left with a judgment as to the degree of your liking of it, but whatever it is as a splurge of being, as a loss, as a charge of the conviction of love stopping your heart like your execution, there is no memory of it in the brain, only the deduction that it happened and that time passed, leaving you with a silhouette that you want to fill in again."

"There is no longer any such thing as fiction or nonfiction; there’s only narrative."

"Planning to write is not writing. Outlining ...researching ...talking to people about what you’re doing, none of that is writing. Writing is writing."

"Writing is an exploration. You start from nothing and learn as you go."

"It’s like driving a car at night. You never see further than your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way."

"In the twentieth century one of the most personal relationships to have developed is that of the person and the state... It’s become a fact of life that governments have become very intimate with people, most always to their detriment."

"History is the present. That’s why every generation writes it anew. But what most people think of as history is its end product, myth."

"I try to avoid experience if I can. Most experience is bad."

"The writer isn’t made in a vacuum. Writers are witnesses. The reason we need writers is because we need witnesses to this terrifying century."

"One of the writers who has especially influenced me is the great American novelist E. L. Doctorow. On the level of craft, the fearless way he structures his stories and views the world, the way he writes about the working class, poverty, aspiration, all while taking creative risks—repeatedly—reading his books has been absolutely pivotal for me as a writer."

"Your heaviest artillery will be your will to live. Keep that big gun going."

"[The recovery] began, I said, when I decided that some experts don't really know enough to make a pronouncement of doom on a human being. And I said I hoped they would be careful about what they said to others; they might be believed and that could be the beginning of the end."

"Cynicism is intellectual treason."

"Inevitably, an individual is measured by his or her largest concerns."

"The eternal quest of the individual human being is to shatter his loneliness."

"Laughter is a form of internal jogging. It moves your internal organs around. It enhances respiration. It is an igniter of great expectations.."

"Most men think they are immortal--until they get a cold, when they think they are going to die within the hour.."

"Optimism doesn’t wait on facts. It deals with prospects. Pessimism is a waste of time."

"War is an invention of the human mind. The human mind can invent peace with justice."

"A library, to modify the famous metaphor of Socrates, should be the delivery room for the birth of ideas — a place where history comes to life."

"What a man really says when he says that someone else can be persuaded by force, is that he himself is incapable of more rational means of communication."

"What was most significant about the lunar voyage was not that men set foot on the moon but that they set eye on the earth."

"There is a tendency to mistake data for wisdom, just as there has always been a tendency to confuse logic with values, intelligence with insight. Unobstructed access to facts can produce unlimited good only if it is matched by the desire and ability to find out what they mean and where they lead. Facts are terrible things if left sprawling and unattended. They are too easily regarded as evaluated certainties rather than as the rawest of raw materials crying to be processed into the texture of logic. It requires a very unusual mind, Whitehead said, to undertake the analysis of a fact. The computer can provide a correct number, but it may be an irrelevant number until judgment is pronounced."

"Governments are not built to perceive large truths. Only people can perceive great truths. Governments specialize in small and intermediate truths. They have to be instructed by their people in great truths."

"Hope, faith, love and a strong will to live offer no promise of immortality, only proof of our uniqueness ans human beings and the opportunity to experience full growth even under the grimmest circumstances. Far more real than the ticking of time is the way we open up the minutes and invest them with meaning. Death is not the ultimate tragedy in life. The ultimate tragedy is to die without discovering the possibilities of full growth."

"Death is not the greatest loss in life. The greatest loss is what dies within us while we live."

"We will not have peace by afterthought."

"If the United Nations is to survive, those who represent it must bolster it; those who advocate it must submit to it; and those who believe in it must fight for it."

"The present mode of life on earth is madness, which is nontheless lethal for being legal. Rational existence is possible, but it calls for a world consciousness and a world design. People who develop the habit of thinking of themselves as world citizens are fulfilling the first requirement of sanity in our time."

"A book is like a piece of rope; it takes on meaning only in connection with the things it holds together."

"Life is an adventure in forgiveness."

"History is a vast early warning system."

"Wisdom consists of the anticipation of consequences."

"The main failure of education is that it has not prepared people to comprehend matters concerning human destiny."

"If something comes to life in others because of you, then you have made an approach to immortality."

"The more serious the illness, the more important it is for you to fight back, mobilizing all your resources — spiritual, emotional, intellectual, physical."

"It is obvious, therefore, that attempts to classify mankind, based on the present distribution of type, language and culture, must lead to different results, according to the point of view taken; that a classification based primarily on type alone will lead to a system which represents more or less accurately the blood- relationships of the people; but these do not need to coincide with their cultural relationships. In the same way classifications based on language and culture do not need to coincide with a biological classification."

"Courtesy, modesty, good manners, conformity to definite ethical standards are universal, but what constitutes courtesy, modesty, good manners, and definite ethical standards is not universal. It is instructive to know that standards differ in the most unexpected ways,"