“When the police came, they found my brother asleep on the roof. Nobody knows how he got there.”

“When my brother, Joseph, was sick and in the hospital, you got in bed with me when I was asleep and you kept trying to touch me! All these years I’d thought that maybe it was all a dream, but it wasn’t! You son of a bitch. I was eight years old, crazy with grief for my brother, Joseph, and you—how could you?!”

“When he was nearly thirteen, my brother Jem got his arm badly broken at the elbow.”

“You give attention to army, police and things like that. Who pays attention to science? When I got the Dan David prize, which is similar to Nobel and given once in a few years by Israel, nobody talked about it. Nobody asked me anything about it. Nobody even knows and nobody understands it. It is so prestigious in the world of science but why didn’t anyone write about it?”

“A man knows when he has found his vocation when he stops thinking about how to live and begins to live.”

“Miracles are like meatballs because nobody knows what they are made of, where they came from or how often they should appear.”

“There is no sound more peaceful than rain on the roof, if you're safe asleep in someone else's house.”

“He who has found a good wife has found great happiness, but a quarrelsome woman is like a roof that lets in the rain.”

“My brother, Toby, is six-foot-six, [and] he [went to] Vassar; my other brother, Brown; my sister, without one penny from me or my [step]dad, NYU Law, number one in her class—Jesus, it's such a functional family, I don't know where I came from.”

“The best compliment I ever got in my life came from Chairman Mao of China. When I went there, at a time when nobody wanted to touch China with a 10-foot pole, Mao told me that I'm beautiful because I'm a natural, and he said natural is perfection. So, no character assassination can diminish me and my perfection.”