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" I never really made a choice to live in America, so I should be aware of the social strata outside of the ones that I may live in. "

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" 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. "

" Being naked approaches being revolutionary; going barefoot is mere populism. "

" 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. "

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

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

" 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. "

" In a city like New York, you're aware of the rich and poor. "

" 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. "

" Imagine writing a poem with a sweating, worried-looking boy handing you a different pencil at the end of every word. My golf, you may say, is no poem; nevertheless, I keep wanting it to be one. "

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

" My transition from wanting to be a cartoonist to wanting to be a writer may have come about through that friendly opposition, that even-handed pairing, of pictures and words. "

" If the worst comes true, and the paper book joins the papyrus scroll and parchment codex in extinction, we will miss, I predict, a number of things about it. "

" For a long time, I was under the impression that 'Terry and the Pirates' was the best comic strip in the United States. "

" The essential self is innocent, and when it tastes its own innocence knows that it lives for ever. "

" I see no intrinsic reason why a doubly talented artist might not arise and create a comic-strip novel masterpiece. "

" A room containing Philip Roth, I have noticed, begins hilariously to whirl and pulse with a mix of rebelliousness and constriction that I take to be Oedipal. "

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

" Any activity becomes creative when the doer cares about doing it right or better. "

" The miracle of turning inklings into thoughts and thoughts into words and words into metal and print and ink never palls for me. "

" We do survive every moment, after all, except the last one. "

" Until the 20th century it was generally assumed that a writer had said what he had to say in his works. "

" I'm trying to get the terrorist out of the bugaboo category and into the category of a fellow human being. "

" 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. "

" I'm a dull person. "

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

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

" 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. "

" My golf is so delicate, so tenuously wired together with silent inward prayers, exhortations and unstable visualizations, that the sheer pressure of an additional pair of eyes crumbles the whole rickety structure into rubble. "

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

" The good ending dismisses us with a touch of ceremony and throws a backward light of significance over the story just read. It makes it, as they say, or unmakes it. A weak beginning is forgettable, but the end of a story bulks in the reader's mind like the giant foot in a foreshortened photograph. "