"Art is a person's private vision expressed in aesthetic forms."

"… the world will indulge you just so long Asher Lev. Then it will stop. You will simply have to grow accustomed to that truth."

"A choice tells the world what is most important to a human being. When a man has a "choice "to make he chooses what is most important to him, and that choice tells the world what kind of a man he is."

"I won't talk to you about my family and you won't talk to me about yours. Family talk is either boring or self-pitying. Or it's Gothic, like a Faulkner novel. Who needs to talk about it? It's enough to live it."

"Honest differences of opinion should never be permitted to destroy a friendship, he told me. "Haven't you learned that yet, Reuven?"

"It is strange how ideas can float about and be ignored until they are put into a book. A book can be a weapon..."

"Millions of people can draw. Art is whether there is a scream in you wanting to get out in a special way."

"Did he really believe God wrote stories that were open to one explanation only? A story that knew but one explanation could hardly be interesting and was certainly not worth the trouble of remembering."

"When the alternative is possible disaster, a man must gamble."

"The silence became unreal and seemed suddenly filled with a noise of its own, the noise of a too long silence."

"...a blink of an eye in itself is nothing. But the eye that blinks, that is something."

"One derives great moral strength from a cup of coffee," I said."

"Have thine own way, Lord! Have thine own way! Thou art the Potter and I am the clay."

"> Why does everything that lives have to die? < So life would be precious, Asher. Something that is yours forever, is never precious."

"I held it close to my face and smelled the ink. I have always loved the smell of ink in a new book."

"Do you know what I don't understand about that ball game? I don't understand why I wanted to kill you."

"And then I was crying too, crying with Danny, silently, for his pain and for the years of his suffering, knowing that I loved him, and not knowing whether I hated or loved the long, anguished years of his life."

"We become like dead branches and last year's leaves and what the hell good are we for ourselves and the world in a mental ghetto."

"It's always easier to learn something than to use what you've learned."

"You don't want to make mistakes with people. Sometimes when you make a mistake you lose a human soul."

"You can do anything you want to do. What is rare is this actual wanting to do a specific thing: wanting it so much that you are practically blind to all other things, that nothing else will satisfy you,."

"It was no joy waking up after a dream about that man. He left a taste of thunder in my mouth."

"God is merciful in what He sometimes lets us forget."

"Asher Lev, an artist is a person first. He is an individual. If there is no person, there is no artist."

"Good-bye, Davita. Be discontented with the world. But be respectful at the same time."

"Williamsburg was stifling, narcotized by the heat."

"A word is worth one coin, silence is worth two"

"In Russia I went to a great yeshiva, and in America I work in a carnival."

"A person must know who he is. A person must understand himself, improve himself, learn his weaknesses in order to overcome them. It is hard for a person to understand his own weaknesses."

"They become angry and ugly and they fight anything that's a threat to them. We have to learn how to fight back without hurting them too much."

"I do not know what evil is when it comes to art. I only know what is good art and what is bad art."

"My father's right to shape my life had been taken from him by the same being who gave his own life meaning"

"If everybody who had brains and doubts left Orthodoxy, we would be in a great deal of trouble."

"I walked the streets and tasted the golden sun that lay across the city."

"An artist is a person first."

"It’s not a pretty world, Papa.” “I’ve noticed,” my father said softly."

"An artist has got to get acquainted with himself just as much as he can. It is no easy job, for it is not a present-day habit of humanity."

"A man must be forced to choose. It is only when you are forced to choose that you know what is important to you."

"They are so rigid,' he said in a sudden angry voice. 'Why do they not see that this rigidity turns away our greatest minds?"

"Always be a poet, even in prose."

"One should always be drunk. That's all that matters...But with what? With wine, with poetry, or with virtue, as you chose. But get drunk."

"Genius is nothing more nor less than childhood recaptured at will."

"A book is a garden, an orchard, a storehouse, a party, a company by the way, a counselor, a multitude of counselors."

"Remembering is only a new form of suffering."

"The beautiful is always bizarre."

"If the word doesn't exist, invent it; but first be sure it doesn't exist."

"What strange phenomena we find in a great city, all we need do is stroll about with our eyes open. Life swarms with innocent monsters."

"I have cultivated my hysteria with pleasure and terror."

"There are women who inspire you with the desire to conquer them and to take your pleasure of them; but this one fills you only with the desire to die slowly beneath her gaze."

"Strangeness is a necessary ingredient in beauty."