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" An affair wants to spill, to share its glory with the world. No act is so private it does not seek applause. "

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" America is beyond power; it acts as in a dream, as a face of God. Wherever America is, there is freedom, and wherever America is not, madness rules with chains, darkness strangles millions. Beneath her patient bombers, paradise is possible. "

" I have never liked haircuts. "

" My last vivid boyhood fright from books came when I was 15; I was visiting my uncle and aunt in Greenwich, and, emboldened by my success with 'The Waste Land,' I opened their copy of 'Ulysses.' The whiff of death off those remorseless, closely written pages overpowered me. So: back to soluble mysteries, and jokes that were not cosmic. "

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

" In any interview, you do say more or less than you mean. "

" 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. "

" I was trying to support a family with writing. I didn't have a private income. I had no other profession. "

" New York is a city with virtually no habitable public space - only private spaces expensively maintained within the general disaster. "

" 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. "

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

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

" The dwelling places of Europe have an air of inheritance, or cumulative possession - a hive occupied by generations of bees. "

" A healthy male adult bore consumes each year one and a half times his own weight in other people's patience. "

" I like short stories. "

" The inner spaces that a good story lets us enter are the old apartments of religion. "

" Arabic is very twisting, very beautiful. The call to prayer is quite haunting; it almost makes you a believer on the spot. "

" 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. "

" I love my government not least for the extent to which it leaves me alone. "

" Rain is grace; rain is the sky descending to the earth; without rain, there would be no life. "

" My life is, in a sense, trash. My life is only that of which the residue is my writing. "

" There is no pleasing New Englanders, my dear, their soil is all rocks and their hearts are bloodless absolutes. "

" A room containing Philip Roth, I have noticed, begins hilariously to whirl and pulse with a mix of rebelliousness and constriction that I take to be Oedipal. "

" The miracle of turning inklings into thoughts and thoughts into words and words into metal and print and ink never palls for me. "

" 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. "

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

" Existence itself does not feel horrible; it feels like an ecstasy, rather, which we have only to be still to experience. "

" I see no intrinsic reason why a doubly talented artist might not arise and create a comic-strip novel masterpiece. "

" We don't really want to think that the artist is only very skilled, that he has merely devoted his life to perfecting a certain set of intelligible skills. "

" 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. "

" I think books should have secrets, like people do. "