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

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" Reminiscence and self-parody are part of remaining true to oneself. "

" I picked up 'On Moral Fiction' in the bookstore and looked up myself in the index, but I didn't read it through. I try not to read things that depress me. "

" A number of American colleges are willing to pay a tempting amount to pinch and poke an author for a day or two. "

" 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. "

" Most of American life consists of driving somewhere and then returning home, wondering why the hell you went. "

" That a marriage ends is less than ideal; but all things end under heaven, and if temporality is held to be invalidating, then nothing real succeeds. "

" By the mid-17th century, telescopes had improved enough to make visible the seasonally growing and shrinking polar ice caps on Mars, and features such as Syrtis Major, a dark patch thought to be a shallow sea. "

" When I went away to college, I marveled at the wealth of bookstores around Harvard Square. "

" I feel old only when I look at my hands or at myself in the mirror. "

" A healthy male adult bore consumes each year one and a half times his own weight in other people's patience. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" Now that I am sixty, I see why the idea of elder wisdom has passed from currency. "

" 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. "

" 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 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. "

" I don't write about too many male businessmen, and I'm not apt to write about too many female businessmen. "

" The theme of old age doesn't seem to fascinate Hollywood. "

" In tennis, there is the forehand, the backhand, the overhead smash and the drop volley, all with a different grip. "

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

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

" 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. "

" The writer must face the fact that ordinary lives are what most people live most of the time, and that the novel as a narration of the fantastic and the adventurous is really an escapist plot; that aesthetically, the ordinary, the banal, is what you must deal with. "

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

" I seem to have this need to belong to some church. I get worried on Sunday mornings. "

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

" Writers may be disreputable, incorrigible, early to decay or late to bloom but they dare to go it alone. "

" Thinking it over, I can't locate another artist in the Updike family. "

" I like short stories. "

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