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" Harvard has enough panegyrists without me. "

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" Without books, we might just melt into the airwaves and be just another set of blips. "

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

" What interests me is why men think of women as witches. It's because they're so fascinating and exasperating, so other. "

" Old age treats freelance writers pretty gently. "

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

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

" Customs and convictions change; respectable people are the last to know, or to admit, the change, and the ones most offended by fresh reflections of the facts in the mirror of art. "

" I know more about what it's like to be elderly and infirm and kind of stupid, the way you get forgetful, but on the other hand I'm a littler, wiser, dare we say? The word 'wisdom' has kind of faded out of our vocabulary, but yeah, I'm a little wiser. "

" In fiction, imaginary people become realer to us than any named celebrity glimpsed in a series of rumored events, whose causes and subtler ramifications must remain in the dark. An invented figure like Anna Karenina or Emma Bovary emerges fully into the light of understanding, which brings with it identification, sympathy and pity. "

" Reagan has turned America into a tax haven. "

" A Christian novelist tries to describe the world as it is. "

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

" 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 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. "

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

" We are drawn to artists who tell us that art is difficult to do and takes a spiritual effort, because we are still puritan enough to respect a strenuous spiritual effort. "

" Gods don't answer letters. "

" 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. "

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

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

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

" All cartoonists are geniuses, but Arnold Roth is especially so. "

" 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. "

" Memories, impressions and emotions from the first 20 years on earth are most writers' main material; little that comes afterward is quite so rich and resonant. "

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

" Religion enables us to ignore nothingness and get on with the jobs of life. "

" 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. "

" 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. "