Quotes from Robert Littell

I am a bookworm. For play, I bury myself in the corners of libraries and read.

The difference between and amateur and a professional.. a professional believes if a job is worth doing, it is worth doing well. An amateur believes if a job is worth doing, it very well may be worth doing badly.

Life is short," I told her. "The challenge is to make it sweet.

To the success of our hopeless cause

If you are stupid enough to dine with the devil, for Christ's sake use a long spoon.

It's a mistake to possess comfortable things," he said now. "Soft couches, big beds, large bath tubs, the like. Because if nothing is comfortable you don't settle in; you keep moving. And if you keep moving, you have a better chance of staying ahead of the people who are trying to catch up with you.

Let there be light! said God, and there was light! Let there be blood! says man, and there's a sea!

If you want to keep a big secret, disguise it as a boring and inconsequential secret rather then try to convince people it is not a secret at all.

We need to take our cue from the drug dealers in Hoboken who, when they reach twenty, go to the local undertaker and prepay their funeral because they don't expect to live to thirty.

In Russia we have a proverb--it is dangerous to be right when the government is wrong.

If a thing is worth doing, it's worth doing badly.

It is a great mistake to reduce your enemy to a demon," Starik said. "It leaves you at a distinct disadvantage when you are attempting to outwit him.

Cole was meticulous to a fault; office scuttlebut had it that he never went out in public without first having his shoelaces ironed.

The conversation had gotten off on the wrong foot and she knew it.

Everything, as Mr. Yul Brynner used to tell us six nights a week and Saturday matinees, is a puzzlement.

I don't know what it was like back in Russia, Mr. Falk, but our undergraduates come to college to party and smoke dope and, excuse the expression, screw around. It's bad enough we interrupt this orgy with classes. Let's not lose our heads and insist the students stay awake in them.

Infinity is something like the horizon seen from a ship - no matter how much you advance towards it, it is always beyond your reach. Trying to calculate pi is a going without a getting there.

People kill for tenure at Steklov. How can you abandon it like that?' 'Everyone in Russia has tenure,' Lemuel observed crabbily. 'The problem is they have tenure in Russia.

Broke the ice with, "Don't you think it curious that men shake hands with the same hand they use to wipe their arses?

A coincidence was like a matador's red cape; if you spotted one, your instinct told you to do more than stand there and paw at the ground in frustration.

and he was too dense—and, in recent months, too drunk—to follow Mother into what T.S. Eliot had called, in his poem "Gerontion," "the wilderness of mirrors.

True genius, Churchill taught us, resides in the capacity to evaluate conflicting information.

Espionage is an effort to find windows into men's souls.

I was born in Leningrad, but I came here from Saint Petersburg. Physically, the two occupy the same space. Emotionally, they are light years apart.