"torytelling is a living art, and each teller embellishes, polishes and recreates as she goes along without losing the thematic value."

"We admitted that everything living is born of the dead. For if the soul existed before birth, and in coming to life and being born can be born only from death and dying, must she not after death conti…"

"He picked out this sentence in a New Yorker casual of mine: "After dinner, the men moved into the living room," and he wanted to know why I, or the editors, had put in the comma. I could explain that …"

"Only by discarding a diet based on rotting corpses could men become sane. The fantasy of needing a blood-diet, a corpse-diet, was inseparable from the distorted relation to the parents I had been tryi…"

"The whole thing that makes a mathematician’s life worthwhile is that he gets the grudging admiration of three or four colleagues."