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" For all I know, I am beginning with the ending. My page one can wind up a year later as page two hundred, if it's still even around. "

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" You write differently in each book. It may appear to be similar to readers, but you're a different writer in each book because you haven't approached that subject before. And every subject brings out a different prose strain in you. Fundamentally, yes, you're contained as one writer. But you have various voices. Like a good actor. "

" Should you protect profits? Yes. But run for the hills? No. "

" My goal would be to find a big, fat subject that would occupy me to the end of my life, and when I finish it, I'll die. What's agony is starting; I hate starting them. I just want to keep writing now and end when it ends. "

" A Jew without Jews, without Judaism, without Zionism, without Jewishness, without a temple or an army or even a pistol, a Jew clearly without a home, just the object itself, like a glass or an apple. "

" For me, the passing of time has provided me with subjects I never had before. Subjects I can now look at from a historical perspective. Like the anti-communist era in America. I lived through that. I was a boy; I didn't find a way to write about it until many years later. The same with the Vietnam War. "

" All that we don't know is astonishing. Even more astonishing is what passes for knowing. "

" My traducers propound my alleged malefaction as though I have spewed venom on women for half a century. But only a madman would go to the trouble of writing 31 books in order to affirm his hatred. "

" When you publish a book, it's the world's book. The world edits it. "

" I rarely, if ever, had another book in mind while I was writing the previous book. Each book starts from ashes, really. "

" I cannot and do not live in the world of discretion, not as a writer, anyway. I would prefer to, I assure you - it would make life easier. But discretion is, unfortunately, not for novelists. "

" With the draft, everybody was involved. Everybody was fodder. When you got to be 21, 22 and graduated from college, for two years your life stopped. If you had been running in the direction of your life, you had to stop and do this other thing which was, if not menacing, just plain boring. "

" A writer has to be driven crazy to help him to see. A writer needs his poisons. "

" I write fiction and I'm told it's autobiography, I write autobiography and I'm told it's fiction, so since I'm so dim and they're so smart, let them decide what it is or it isn't. "

" History... is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake. "

" Routinely, when I finish a book, I think 'What will I do? Where will I get an idea?' And a kind of low-level panic sets in. "

" I work all day, morning and afternoon, just about every day. If I sit there like that for two or three years, at the end I have a book. "

" At night, I read. I read for two hours. I just finished a marvelous book by Louise Erdrich, 'The Round House.' But mostly I read 20th-century history and biography. I lived then. I was either a child or at school or at work. "

" I'm an Obama supporter. And if you're an Obama supporter, that means you had a hard time during the Bush years. "

" As I see it, my focus has never been on masculine power rampant and triumphant but rather on the antithesis: masculine power impaired. "

" I'm not good at finding 'encouraging' features in American culture. I doubt that aesthetic literacy has much of a future here. "

" A Jewish man with parents alive is a fifteen-year-old boy, and will remain a fifteen-year-old boy until they die! "

" Literature isn't a moral beauty contest. Its power arises from the authority and audacity with which the impersonation is pulled off; the belief it inspires is what counts. "

" Obviously the facts are never just coming at you but are incorporated by an imagination that is formed by your previous experience. Memories of the past are not memories of facts but memories of your imaginings of the facts. "

" The road to hell is paved with works-in-progress. "

" Making fake biography, false history, concocting a half-imaginary existence out of the actual drama of my life is my life. "

" If I don't measure up as an American writer, at least leave me to my delusion. "

" Writing, for me, was a feat of self-preservation. If I did not do it, I would die. So I did it. Obstinacy, not talent, saved my life. "

" Let me tell you about the nap. It's absolutely fantastic. When I was a kid, my father was always trying to tell me how to be a man. And he said - I was maybe nine - he said, 'Philip, whenever you take a nap, take your clothes off and put a blanket over you, and you're going to sleep better.' Well, as with everything, he was right. "

" People are unjust to anger - it can be enlivening and a lot of fun. "

" Just like those who are incurably ill, the aged know everything about their dying except exactly when. "