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" Art is like baby shoes. When you coat them with gold, they can no longer be worn. "

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" Each morning my characters greet me with misty faces willing, though chilled, to muster for another day's progress through the dazzling quicksand the marsh of blank paper. "

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

" For male and female alike, the bodies of the other sex are messages signaling what we must do, they are glowing signifiers of our own necessities. "

" Dreams come true; without that possibility, nature would not incite us to have them. "

" The rich - they just live in another realm, really. "

" My father taught only math. "

" People are incorrigibly themselves. "

" John Barth, I think, was really a writer of my own age and somewhat of my own temperament, although his books are very different from mine, and he has been a spokesman for the very ambitious, long, rather academic novel. But I don't think that what he is saying, so far as I understand it, is so very different from what I'm saying. "

" I seem most instinctively to believe in the human value of creative writing, whether in the form of verse or fiction, as a mode of truth-telling, self-expression and homage to the twin miracles of creation and consciousness. "

" Gods don't answer letters. "

" When I went away to college, I marveled at the wealth of bookstores around Harvard Square. "

" Being naked approaches being revolutionary; going barefoot is mere populism. "

" 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. "

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

" Golf's ultimate moral instruction directs us to find within ourselves a pivotal center of enjoyment: relax into a rhythm that fits the hills and swales, and play the shot at hand - not the last one, or the next one, but the one at your feet, in the poison ivy, where you put it. "

" My attempt has been really to, beyond making a record of contemporary life, which is what you inevitably do, is trying to make beautiful books - books that are in some way beautiful, that are models of how to use the language, models of honest feeling, models of care. "

" When you sit at your desk, if you're lucky, there's a moment when you feel empowered to be someone or something else, to leap into another skin. "

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

" Reagan has turned America into a tax haven. "

" The first breath of adultery is the freest; after it, constraints aping marriage develop. "

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

" Writing criticism is to writing fiction and poetry as hugging the shore is to sailing in the open sea. "

" I must say, when I reread myself, it's the poetry I tend to look at. It's the most exciting to write, and it's over the quickest. "

" Most of American life consists of driving somewhere and then returning home, wondering why the hell you went. "

" 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. "

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

" Fiction is burdened for me with a sense of duty. "

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

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

" Imagine writing a poem with a sweating, worried-looking boy handing you a different pencil at the end of every word. My golf, you may say, is no poem; nevertheless, I keep wanting it to be one. "