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" A Christian novelist tries to describe the world as it is. "

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" A person believes various things at various times, even on the same day. "

" My golf is so delicate, so tenuously wired together with silent inward prayers, exhortations and unstable visualizations, that the sheer pressure of an additional pair of eyes crumbles the whole rickety structure into rubble. "

" There's a crystallization that goes on in a poem which the young man can bring off, but which the middle-aged man can't. "

" Harvard has enough panegyrists without me. "

" I feel old only when I look at my hands or at myself in the mirror. "

" I don't know; I think I'd be gloomy without some faith that there is a purpose and there is a kind of witness to my life. "

" An aging writer has the not insignificant satisfaction of a shelf of books behind him that, as they wait for their ideal readers to discover them, will outlast him for a while. "

" The firmest house in my fiction, probably, is the little thick-walled sandstone farmhouse of 'The Centaur' and 'Of the Farm'; I had lived in that house, and can visualize every floorboard and bit of worn molding. "

" It's sort of good to see your vocation as a daily task and have fairly modest expectations for financial or reward in other coin - glory, love, whatever. "

" Memories, impressions and emotions from the first 20 years on earth are most writers' main material; little that comes afterward is quite so rich and resonant. "

" Authors should be honored only for their works. "

" I don't think women are dumb. "

" If the worst comes true, and the paper book joins the papyrus scroll and parchment codex in extinction, we will miss, I predict, a number of things about it. "

" Nature refuses to rest. "

" Toni Morrison has a habit, perhaps traceable to the pernicious influence of William Faulkner, of plunging into the narrative before the reader has a clue to what is going on. "

" In tennis, there is the forehand, the backhand, the overhead smash and the drop volley, all with a different grip. "

" It's so hard to make a good tee shot after a birdie. "

" For some of us, books are intrinsic to our sense of personal identity. "

" Writing makes you more human. "

" The study of literature threatens to become a kind of paleontology of failure, and criticism a supercilious psychoanalysis of authors. "

" The good ending dismisses us with a touch of ceremony and throws a backward light of significance over the story just read. It makes it, as they say, or unmakes it. A weak beginning is forgettable, but the end of a story bulks in the reader's mind like the giant foot in a foreshortened photograph. "

" To be a human being is to be in a state of tension between your appetites and your dreams, and the social realities around you and your obligations to your fellow man. "

" In art, anything goes, and if it goes, it goes. "

" I like short stories. "

" We are most alive when we're in love. "

Valentine's Day

" There is a great deal of busywork to a writer's life, as to a professor's life, a great deal of work that matters only in that, if you don't do it, your desk becomes very full of papers. So, there is a lot of letter answering and a certain amount of speaking, though I try to keep that at a minimum. "

" It is in middles that extremes clash, where ambiguity restlessly rules. "

" I would write ads for deodorants or labels for catsup bottles if I had to. "

" My wife and I had children when we were children ourselves. "

" We take our bearings, daily, from others. To be sane is, to a great extent, to be sociable. "