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" I never intended to be a teacher. I just like going to school and learning things. "

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" Poetry and fiction have grieved for a century now over the loss of some vitality which they think they see in a past from which we are by now irrevocably alienated. "

" Fiction's essential activity is to imagine how others feel, what a Saturday afternoon in an Italian town in the 2nd Century looked like. My ambition is solely to get some effect, as of light on stone in a forest on a September day. "

" The real use of imaginative reading is precisely to suspend one's mind in the workings of another sensibility. "

" My view, as one who taught it, is that the whole purpose of a literary education should be to tell people that these things exist. I don't think any teacher should try to 'teach an author,' but rather simply describe what the author has written. And this is what I tried to do. "

" Art knows neither doctrine nor idea; its nature is to show. "

" I am not writing for scholars or fellow critics, but for people who like to read, to look at pictures, and to know things. "

" The difference between the Parthenon and the World Trade Center, between a French wine glass and a German beer mug, between Bach and John Philip Sousa, between Sophocles and Shakespeare, between a bicycle and a horse, though explicable by historical moment, necessity, and destiny, is before all a difference of imagination. "

" As long as you have ideas, you can keep going. That's why writing fiction is so much fun: because you're moving people about, and making settings for them to move in, so there's always something there to keep working on. "

" Imagination is like the drunk man who lost his watch and must get drunk again to find it. "

" There's nothing like being a soldier for confidence or learning your limits or enduring utter humiliation. "

" Unless the work of art has wholly exhausted its maker's attention, it fails. This is why works of great significance are demanding and why they are infinitely rewarding. "

" I like to believe that I don't think of myself as a writer. I am an amateur. Back when I was teaching, I wrote when I could. Weekends were good typewriter time. Now, it's whenever I feel there's something to be put on paper. I don't care what time it is, though I always write in the notebooks at night. "