"The Englishman is under no constitutional obligation to believe that all men are created equal. The American agony is therefore scarcely intelligible like a saint's self-flagellation viewed by an atheist."

"What I'm going to do is pry every stinking tag off these f.ing chairs and make a f.ing collar and throw that cat right in Connor's puked-up face. Pale turd."

"Government is either organized benevolence or organized madness; its peculiar magnitude permits no shading."

"Russia is the only country of the world you can be homesick for while you're still in it."

"I was made to feel I could do things. If you get this feeling early and can hold it until you're 15, you tend to never lose it."

"Truth should not be forced; it should simply manifest itself, like a woman who has in her privacy reflected and coolly decided to bestow herself upon a certain man."

"As long as Nelson was socked into baseball statistics or that guitar or even the rock records that threaded their sound through all the fibers of the house, his occupation of the room down the hall was no more uncomfortable than the persistence of Rabbit's own childhood in an annex of his brain; but when the stuff with hormones and girls and cars and beers began, Harry wanted out of fatherhood."

"The scrape and snap of Keds on loose alley pebbles seems to catapult their voices high into the moist March air blue above the wires."

"Being able to write becomes a kind of shield, a way of hiding, a way of too instantly transforming pain into honey."

"The first breath of adultery is the freest; after it, constraints aping marriage develop."

"I know more about what it's like to be elderly and infirm and kind of stupid, the way you get forgetful, but on the other hand I'm a littler, wiser, dare we say? The word 'wisdom' has kind of faded out of our vocabulary, but yeah, I'm a little wiser."

"Rain is grace; rain is the sky descending to the earth; without rain, there would be no life."

"The inner spaces that a good story lets us enter are the old apartments of religion."

"Mozart's music gives us permission to live."

"A leader is one who, out of madness or goodness, volunteers to take upon himself the woe of the people. There are few men so foolish, hence the erratic quality of leadership in the world."

"When I write, I aim in my mind not toward New York but toward a vague spot a little to the east of Kansas."

"Art is like baby shoes. When you coat them with gold, they can no longer be worn."

"That a marriage ends is less than ideal; but all things end under heaven, and if temporality is held to be invalidating, then nothing real succeeds."

"To say that war is madness is like saying that sex is madness: true enough, from the standpoint of a stateless eunuch, but merely a provocative epigram for those who must make their arrangements in the world as given."