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" I have never liked haircuts. "

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

" Celebrity is a mask that eats into the face. "

" Billy Collins writes lovely poems. Limpid, gently and consistently startling, more serious than they seem, they describe all the worlds that are and were and some others besides. "

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" The Founding Fathers in their wisdom decided that children were an unnatural strain on parents. So they provided jails called schools, equipped with tortures called an education. "

" The writers we tend to universally admire, like Beckett, or Kafka, or TS Eliot, are not very prolific. "

" 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. "

" In any interview, you do say more or less than you mean. "

" 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 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. "

" I don't think women are dumb. "

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

" 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. "

" My last vivid boyhood fright from books came when I was 15; I was visiting my uncle and aunt in Greenwich, and, emboldened by my success with 'The Waste Land,' I opened their copy of 'Ulysses.' The whiff of death off those remorseless, closely written pages overpowered me. So: back to soluble mysteries, and jokes that were not cosmic. "

" Government is either organized benevolence or organized madness; its peculiar magnitude permits no shading. "

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

" It's sort of good to see your vocation as a daily task and have fairly modest expectations for financial or reward in other coin - glory, love, whatever. "

" 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 don't know; I think I'd be gloomy without some faith that there is a purpose and there is a kind of witness to my life. "

" There's almost nothing worse to live with than a struggling artist. "

" 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. "

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

" Sometimes it seems the whole purpose of pets is to bring death into the house. "

" The inner spaces that a good story lets us enter are the old apartments of religion. "

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

" People are incorrigibly themselves. "

" 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. "