Herman Wouk

"You can know almost anything about G-d, provided you put the right questions to Him. You have to learn how to put the questions, and they have to be accurate and airtight. [...] [M]y father, for instance, doesnt know that two atoms of hydrogen bind with one atom of oxygen to form a water molecule. Yet its G-ds truth, and an important one. You dont know it [...] you believe it because you read it somewhere, or a teacher told you. I know it. Ive put the question, and He answered, straight out. G-d will answer a high school boy. He asks only that you use common sense, pay very close attention to Him, not be sloppy, and count and measure correctly. G-d ignores sloppy questions. Sloppiness is the opposite of G-dliness. G-d is exact. He is marvelously, purely exact. Theology is all slop. Moses gave the best answers you could get, three thousand years ago, and he was no theologian."

"We are in the black theater of nonexistence. In an eye blink the curtain is up, the stage ablaze, for the vast drama of ourselves."

"I felt there’s a wealth in Jewish tradition, a great inheritance. I’d be a jerk not to take advantage of it."

"This is an excellent martini—sort of tastes like it isn’t there at all, just a cold cloud."

"I regard the writing of humor as a supreme artistic challenge."

"There is a mystery about the Jews … and within this mystery lies the reason for the folk pride of the house of Abraham. This pride exists despite the disabilities that come from many centuries of ostracism."

"Deep in the heart of both critical Christian and alienated Jew, there is … a feeling, not even a feeling, a shadow of a notion, nothing more substantial than the pointless but compelling impulse to knock on wood when one talks of the health of children—something that says there is more to Jews than meets the eye."