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" Four years was enough of Harvard. I still had a lot to learn, but had been given the liberating notion that now I could teach myself. "

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" Eros is everywhere. It is what binds. "

" The essential support and encouragement comes from within, arising out of the mad notion that your society needs to know what only you can tell it. "

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

" I suppose sequels are inevitable for a writer of a certain age. "

" Gods don't answer letters. "

" Nature refuses to rest. "

" 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. "

" The refusal to rest content, the willingness to risk excess on behalf of one's obsessions, is what distinguishes artists from entertainers, and what makes some artists adventurers on behalf of us all. "

" 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. "

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

" To be President of the United States, sir, is to act as advocate for a blind, venomous, and ungrateful client. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

" Books externalise our brains and turn our homes into thinking bodies. "

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

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

" The substance of fictional architecture is not bricks and mortar but evanescent consciousness. "

" My interest generally is the hidden Americans; the ones who live far away from the headlines. "

" We're past the age of heroes and hero kings... Most of our lives are basically mundane and dull, and it's up to the writer to find ways to make them interesting. "

" I don't think women are dumb. "

" I was raised in the Depression, when there was a great sense of dog-eat-dog and people fighting over scraps. "

" Perhaps I have written fiction because everything unambiguously expressed seems somehow crass to me; and when the subject is myself, I want to jeer and weep. "

" 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. "

" I have never liked haircuts. "

" 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 a city like New York, you're aware of the rich and poor. "

" Smaller than a breadbox, bigger than a TV remote, the average book fits into the human hand with a seductive nestling, a kiss of texture, whether of cover cloth, glazed jacket, or flexible paperback. "

" American art in general... takes to surreal exaggerations and metaphors; but its Puritan work ethic has little use for the playful self-indulgence behind Parisian Surrealism. "