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" 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. "

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" Memory has a spottiness, as if the film was sprinkled with developer instead of immersed in it. "

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

" 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. "

" Golf's ultimate moral instruction directs us to find within ourselves a pivotal center of enjoyment: relax into a rhythm that fits the hills and swales, and play the shot at hand - not the last one, or the next one, but the one at your feet, in the poison ivy, where you put it. "

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

" Writing makes you more human. "

" I think my first story sold for $550. This was in 1954, and it seemed like quite a lot of money, and I said to myself, 'Hey, I'm a professional writer now.' "

" To be President of the United States, sir, is to act as advocate for a blind, venomous, and ungrateful client. "

" 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. "

" Tiger Woods did not always win majors with ease; after his narrow victory in the 1999 PGA, he slumped and sighed as if he'd been carrying rocks uphill all afternoon. "

" I should mention something that nobody ever thinks about, but proofreading takes a lot of time. After you write something, there are these proofs that keep coming, and there's this panicky feeling that 'This is me and I must make it better.' "

" Rain is grace; rain is the sky descending to the earth; without rain, there would be no life. "

" Authors should be honored only for their works. "

" 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. "

" For some of us, books are intrinsic to our sense of personal identity. "

" Some stories or passages are more difficult and demand more fussing with than others, but, in general, I'm a two-draft writer rather than a six-draft writer, or whatever. "

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

" I find in my own writing that only fiction - and rarely, a poem - fully tests me to the kind of limits of what I know and what I feel. "

" I don't think women are dumb. "

" Art is like baby shoes. When you coat them with gold, they can no longer be worn. "

" 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. "

" My reading as a child was lazy and cowardly, and it is yet. I was afraid of encountering, in a book, something I didn't want to know. "

" 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. "