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" Gods don't answer letters. "

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" I like short stories. "

" Bookstores are lonely forts, spilling light onto the sidewalk. They civilize their neighborhoods. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" My father taught only math. "

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

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

" My reading as a child was lazy and cowardly, and it is yet. I was afraid of encountering, in a book, something I didn't want to know. "

" 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. "

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

" There's a crystallization that goes on in a poem which the young man can bring off, but which the middle-aged man can't. "

" Professionalism in art has this difficulty: To be professional is to be dependable, to be dependable is to be predictable, and predictability is esthetically boring - an anti-virtue in a field where we hope to be astonished and startled and at some deep level refreshed. "

" Harvard has enough panegyrists without me. "

" When I write, I aim in my mind not toward New York but toward a vague spot a little to the east of Kansas. "

" My wife and I had children when we were children ourselves. "

" The first author I met socially was Joyce Cary. "

" A narrative is like a room on whose walls a number of false doors have been painted; while within the narrative, we have many apparent choices of exit, but when the author leads us to one particular door, we know it is the right one because it opens. "

" Golf appeals to the idiot in us and the child. Just how childlike golf players become is proven by their frequent inability to count past five. "

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

" There's something very reassuring... about the written record. "

" 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. "

" The cinema has done more for my spiritual life than the church. My ideas of fame, success and beauty all originate from the big screen. Whereas Christian religion is retreating everywhere and losing more and more influence; film has filled the vacuum and supports us with myths and action-controlling images. "

" But for a few phrases from his letters and an odd line or two of his verse, the poet walks gagged through his own biography. "

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

" I still want to give my public, such as it is, a book a year. "

" I find in my own writing that only fiction - and rarely, a poem - fully tests me to the kind of limits of what I know and what I feel. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

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