All I can tell you with certainty is that I, for one, have no self, and that I am unwilling or unable to perpetrate upon myself the joke of a self.... What I have instead is a variety of impersonations I can do, and not only of myself - a troupe of players that I have internalised, a permanent company of actors that I can call upon when a self is required.... I am a theater and nothing more than a theater.

Is an intelligent human being likely to be much more than a large-scale manufacturer of misunderstanding?

I don't ask writers about their work habits. I really don't care. Joyce Carol Oates says somewhere that when writers ask each other what time they start workin…

England's made a Jew of me in only eight weeks, which, on reflection, might be the least painful method. A Jew without Jews, without Judaism, without Zionism, …

It is terrible to destroy a person's picture of himself in the interests of truth or some other abstraction.

Meanings are not determined by situations, but we determine ourselves by the meanings we give to situations.

I'm an egomaniac with an inferiority complex.