"A beauty is not suddenly in a circle. It comes with rapture. A great deal of beauty is rapture. A circle is a necessity. Otherwise you would see no one. We each have our circle."

"The whole duty of man consists in being reasonable and just... I am reasonable because I know the difference between understanding and not understanding and I am just because I have no opinion about things I don’t understand."

"Argument is to me the air I breathe. Given any proposition, I cannot help believing the other side and defending it."

"From the very nature of progress, all ages must be transitional. If they were not, the world would be at a stand-still and death would speedily ensue. It is one of the tamest of platitudes but it is always introduced by a flourish of trumpets."

"Forever goes quick."

"Bellow (what a wonderful novel Humboldt's Gift is), Updike and Heller started very differently, but their own lives are octopuses taking up more and more space in their books: their divorces etc."

"The end result of experiencing terror and injury is not an increase in compassion, but a tendency toward callousness."

"There’s a big cocktail party on Martha’s Vineyard. Someone comes up to this writer, I think it’s Joseph Heller, and says, “Joe, see that guy over there? He’s a hedge fund manager, and he made more money yesterday than you made on all the books you have ever published.” Heller looks over, pauses, and says, “Yeah, but I have something he’ll never have: enough.”"

"She knew Pota had a larger respect for personal privacy than he did for God, Congress, or the U.S. Constitution and never looked at anything there except, occasionally, for the remote control to the television set."

"Anyone seeking public office was not worthy to hold it."

"God had no need for Ecclesiastes to acquaint Him with vanity."

"There is wisdom in madness and strong probability of truth in all accusations, for people are complete and everybody is capable of everything"

"Fools hate knowledge"

"If the chance ever comes to you to fall in love, grab it, every time. You might always live to regret it, but you won't find anything to beat it, and you won't know if it will come to you once more."

"God is a murderer, imagine that. I told you I had the best story in the Bible, didn't I? I have always known that He was. Sooner or later He murders us all, doesn't He, and we go back to the dust from which we came. So I'm no longer scared to defy him. All He can do is kill me."

"I imagine that God Himself frequently wants to feel like a king. Why else would He create the world?"

"The truth is whatever people will believe is the truth. Don't you know history?"

"Vanity. What's wrong with vanity? It doesn't satisfy."

"No one lusting for blood is ever innocent. Or satisfied. I have not been innocent. Or satisfied. Just as the man who wants silver will not be satisfied with silver, a man who wants the blood of another will not be satisfied with having that blood, nor the woman with jewels be satisfied with jewels, and the man who wants women will not be satisfied with women. Don't try telling me different. Haven't I looked about me in the city and seen how all labor is for the mouth, yet the appetite is not filled? Don't I know myself that no want is ever satisfied? Wishes are granted, goals attained. But wants? Forget them. They live as long as the person they inhabit."

"If God was dead, how could I feel this bad?"

"All is vanity, you know, ALL in the long run is but vanity and vexation of spirit."

"I'm not even sure we really had that much need for God as much as we did seem to have a need to believe in Him."

"The last thing any sensible human being should want is immortality. As it is, life lasts too long for most of us."

"Everybody is as unstable as water."

"How ironic the difference between me and my young son Absalom, between his soliciting the soundest means of overtaking me and having my life, while I was cudgeling my brains for a way to spare his. "Deal gently for my sake with the young man Absalom," were my mawkish words to my commanders as their men trooped past me toward the positions they would take up in the field outside the wood of Ephraim for the battle in which he would die. "Beware that none touch the young man Absalom," I urged like a fool. No, not like a fool, but like a fond, doting father who will overlook and excuse everything in the child he loves best, and who breaks his heart. And in that singular disparity in our desires abides his lasting victory over me: I loved him and he did not love me."

"Now THERE'S a hollow state to be in, isn't it — to believe in God and get no sign that He's there."

"He who steals my purse steals trash, but he that filches from me my good name robs me of that which not enriches him, and makes me poor indeed. (Shakespeare's Othello said it first.)"

"No one who ever wants praise will be satisfied with praise, the person who wants love cannot be satisfied with love. No want is ever fulfilled. And therefore I still don't know whether it is better to fear God and keep His commandments or to curse God and die."

"How dispiriting I find it, even after all my personal triumphs, that we must grow up and grow sad, that we must age, weaken, and in time go home to our long home in the ground, and that even golden lads and girls all must, as chimney sweepers, come to dust."

"Nothing fails like success."

"The problem with the loneliness I suffer is that the company of others has never been a cure for it."

"If character is destiny, the good are damned."

"Is he in heaven? Is he in hell?" "There is no heaven. There is no hell." "There is no heaven? There is no hell?" "That's all in your mind."

"I am arrogant enough to wish I were modest as he and modest enough to know that this is arrogance."

"When one is infatuated, faults are endearing that in others would be heinous."

"God does have this self-serving habit of putting all blame for His own mistakes on other people, doesn't He? He picks someone arbitrarily, unbidden, right out of the blue so to speak, and levies upon them tasks of monumental difficulty for which we don't always measure up in every particular, then charges US for HIS error in selecting imperfectly. He tends to forget that we are no more infallible than He is."

"He [God] owes me an apology too- at the very least. I'm not saying I shouldn't have been punished for those sins I committed. I'm saying that the punishments he chose were inhuman. I wonder what favor I'd want. I think I may be afraid to ask for it. I'm afraid He won't grant it. I'm more afraid that He will. Wouldn't it be tragic to find out that He really has been here all this time?"

"The wise man dies no better or more wisely than the fool. In what way, then, is the wise man wise?"

"Destiny is a good thing to accept when it's going your way. When it isn't, don't call it destiny; call it injustice, treachery or simple bad luck."

"Love is potent stuff, isn't it?"

"Didn't I once observe that there is nothing new under the sun?"

"I think I may have been the first grown man in the world to fall truly, passionately, sexually, romantically and sentimentally in love. I practically invented it."

"I hate God and I hate life. And the closer I come to death, the more I hate life."

"The promises of maniacs, like those of women, are not safely relied upon."

"Whether God is dead or not hardly matters, for we would use him no differently anyway."

"Gold was opposed to segregation and equally opposed to integration. Certainly he did not believe that women or homosexuals should suffer persecution or discrimination. On the other hand, he was privately opposed to all equal rights amendments, for he certainly did not want members of either group associating with him on levels of equality or familiarity."

"Women don't suffer from penis envy. Men do."

"Women my wife's age with broken marriages take up robustly with fellows much younger than themselves, sometimes boys, and their husbands don't like that part of it at all. (It's a means they have of really sticking it to us. The husbands can do without the money and kids. But they can't abide their wives' humping a younger dick and letting everyone know.)"

"In my middle years, I have exchanged the position of the fetus for the position of a corpse."