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

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" For whatever crispness and animation my writing has I give some credit to the cartoonist manque. "

" The reader knows the writer better than he knows himself; but the writer's physical presence is light from a star that has moved on. "

" When I was born, my parents and my mother's parents planted a dogwood tree in the side yard of the large white house in which we lived throughout my boyhood. This tree I learned quite early, was exactly my age - was, in a sense, me. "

" The Founding Fathers in their wisdom decided that children were an unnatural strain on parents. So they provided jails called schools, equipped with tortures called an education. "

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

" For many years, I read mystery novels for relaxation. But my tastes were too narrow - and, having read all of Agatha Christie and John Dickson Carr, I discovered that the implausibility and the thinness of the people distracted me unduly from the plot. "

" Writing makes you more human. "

" I don't write about too many male businessmen, and I'm not apt to write about too many female businessmen. "

" New York, like the Soviet Union, has this universal usefulness: It makes you glad you live elsewhere. "

" I've always tried to write about America. It's very worth a writer's effort. "

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

" In my first 15 or 20 years of authorship, I was almost never asked to give a speech or an interview. The written work was supposed to speak for itself, and to sell itself, sometimes even without the author's photograph on the back flap. "

" I didn't need to write historical epics, no, or science fiction, though I read a lot of science fiction as a kid and rather liked it. But I didn't have the mentality. "

" Authors should be honored only for their works. "

" 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. "

" Some golfers, we are told, enjoy the landscape; but properly, the landscape shrivels and compresses into the grim, surrealistically vivid patch of grass directly under the golfer's eyes as he morosely walks toward where he thinks his ball might be. "

" By the mid-17th century, telescopes had improved enough to make visible the seasonally growing and shrinking polar ice caps on Mars, and features such as Syrtis Major, a dark patch thought to be a shallow sea. "

" Our artistic heroes tend to be those self-exercisers, like Picasso, and Nabokov, and Wallace Stevens, who rather defiantly kept playing past dark. "

" Baseball skills schizophrenically encompass a pitcher's, a batter's and a fielder's. "

" From infancy on, we are all spies; the shame is not this but that the secrets to be discovered are so paltry and few. "

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

" America is a vast conspiracy to make you happy. "

" 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. "

" Reminiscence and self-parody are part of remaining true to oneself. "

" Inspiration arrives as a packet of material to be delivered. "

" My first ambition was to be an animator for Walt Disney. Then I wanted to be a magazine cartoonist. "

" In leaving New York in 1957, I did leave without regret the literary demimonde of agents and would-be's and with-it nonparticipants; this world seemed unnutritious and interfering. "

" Celebrity is a mask that eats into the face. "

" A seventeenth-century house can be recognized by its steep roof, massive central chimney and utter porchlessness. Some of those houses have a second-story overhang, emphasizing their medieval look. "

" Old age treats freelance writers pretty gently. "