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

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" Authors should be honored only for their works. "

" Young or old, a writer sends a book into the world, not himself. "

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

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

" Truth should not be forced; it should simply manifest itself, like a woman who has in her privacy reflected and coolly decided to bestow herself upon a certain man. "

" 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. "

" My father taught only math. "

" 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. "

" A lot of the Koran does not speak very eloquently to a Westerner. Much of it is either legalistic or opaquely poetic. "

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

" Mars has long exerted a pull on the human imagination. The erratically moving red star in the sky was seen as sinister or violent by the ancients: The Greeks identified it with Ares, the god of war; the Babylonians named it after Nergal, god of the underworld. To the ancient Chinese, it was Ying-huo, the fire planet. "

" I was an only child. I needed an alternative to family life - to real life, you could almost say - and cartoons, pictures in a book, the animated movies, seemed to provide it. "

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

" For many years, I read mystery novels for relaxation. But my tastes were too narrow - and, having read all of Agatha Christie and John Dickson Carr, I discovered that the implausibility and the thinness of the people distracted me unduly from the plot. "

" My complaint, as an exile who once loved New York and who likes to return a half-dozen times a year, is not that it plays host to extremes of the human condition: There is grandeur in that, and necessity. "

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

" Belief, like love, must be voluntary. "

" Nature refuses to rest. "

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

" I've always tried to write about America. It's very worth a writer's effort. "

" I think you remember certain phrases from bad reviews. You don't remember all the bad reviews. "

" Most Americans haven't had my happy experience of living for thirteen years in a seventeenth-century house, since most of America lacks seventeenth-century houses. "

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

" 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. "

" A leader is one who, out of madness or goodness, volunteers to take upon himself the woe of the people. There are few men so foolish, hence the erratic quality of leadership in the world. "

" The dwelling places of Europe have an air of inheritance, or cumulative possession - a hive occupied by generations of bees. "

" I love Shillington not as one loves Capri or New York, because they are special, but as one loves one's own body and consciousness, because they are synonymous with being. "

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

" Does fiction, artistic writing, have much of a future? I must say it's on the way out. "