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" I still believe nonfiction is the most important literature to come out of the second half of the 20th century. "

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" By the time I received my doctorate in American studies in 1957, I was in the twisted grip of a disease of our times in which the sufferer experiences an overwhelming urge to join the 'real world.' So I started working for newspapers. "

" 'Why' is a question no animal can ask, because both the question and answers require speech. Have you ever seen an animal shrug? "

" Not long after I published my first book, I quickly found I was terrible at being interviewed. "

" Driving a stock car does not require much handling ability, at least not as compared to Grand Prix racing, because the tracks are simple banked ovals and there is almost no shifting of gears. So, qualifying becomes a test of raw nerve - of how fast a man is willing to take a curve. "

" I wrote 'The Painted Word,' about modern art, and was denounced as reactionary. In fact, it is just a history, although a rather loaded one. "

" It's fortunate that I am a writer, because that has helped me understand the properties of words. They are what have made life complex. In the battle for status in the animal kingdom, power and aggressiveness have been all-important. But among humans, once they acquired speech, all that changed. "

" We are now in the Me Decade - seeing the upward roll of the third great religious wave in American history. "

" There was a time in the 1930s when magazine writers could actually make a good living. 'The Saturday Evening Post' and 'Collier's' both had three stories in each issue. These were usually entertaining, and people really went for them. But then television came along, and now of course, information technology... the new way of killing time. "

" There are some people who have the quality of richness and joy in them and they communicate it to everything they touch. It is first of all a physical quality; then it is a quality of the spirit. "

" I have never knowingly, I swear to God, written satire. The word connotes exaggeration of the foibles of mankind. To me, mankind just has foibles. You don't have to push it! "

" By the 1950s The Novel had become a nationwide tournament. There was a magical assumption that the end of World War II in 1945 was the dawn of a new golden age of the American Novel, like the Hemingway-Dos Passos-Fitzgerald era after World War I. "

" I read somewhere that writers, as they get older, become more and more perfectionist. Which may be because they think more highly of themselves and they worry about their reputations. I think there's some truth to that. "

" God, newspapers have been making up stories forever. This kind of trifling and fooling around is not a function of the New Journalism. "

" That's mostly what the Internet is, just passing the time. But unfortunately you are dealing with words that can have meaning. "

" When I went to high school, my most passionate desire was to be a professional baseball player. But something within me told me that was not going to happen. "

" The first newspaper I worked on was the 'Springfield Union' in Springfield, Massachusetts. I wrote over a hundred letters to newspapers asking for work and got three responses, two no's. "

" Most people don't read editorial pages. I think I must have been 40 before I even looked at an editorial page. "

" There is no spectacle on earth more appealing than that of a beautiful woman in the act of cooking dinner for someone she loves. "

Beautiful Woman

" It helps to know from a very early age what you want to do. From the time I was five years old, I wanted to be a writer, even though I couldn't even read. It was mainly because I thought of my father as a writer. "

" The modern notion of art is an essentially religious or magical one in which the artist is viewed as a holy beast who in some way, big or small, receives flashes from the godhead, which is known as creativity. "

" Nonfiction is never going to die. "

" The greatest promotion I ever had on a newspaper was when 'The Washington Post' suddenly promoted me from city-side general assignment reporter to Latin American correspondent and sent me off to Cuba. Fidel Castro had just come to power. It was a very exciting assignment, but also very serious. "

" So many people in this country have a dual loyalty. They have loyalty to America, but they also are determined to have their parade up Fifth Avenue once a year... a Cuban parade or a Puerto Rican parade - many other countries. So they really don't forget. "

" I wrote a number of pieces in the year 1966 that were so bad that, although I'm a great collector of my own pieces, I have never collected them. "

" A cult is a religion with no political power. "

" If I had my choice, I would be writing by typewriter. I worked on newspapers for 10 years. I typed with the touch system, and unfortunately, you can't keep typewriters going today. You have to take the ribbons back to be re-inked. You have to - it's a horrible search to try to find missing parts. So I went to the computer. "

" I was sitting in my office when someone called to tell me two light planes had collided with the World Trade Centre. I turned on my television; before long, there was this procession of people of all kinds walking up the street. What I remember most was the silence of that crowd; there was no sound. "

" There is no motivation higher than being a good writer. "

" I do novels a bit backward. I look for a situation, a milieu first, and then I wait to see who walks into it. "

" This is the artist, then, life's hungry man, the glutton of eternity, beauty's miser, glory's slave. "