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" I still want to give my public, such as it is, a book a year. "

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" To be a human being is to be in a state of tension between your appetites and your dreams, and the social realities around you and your obligations to your fellow man. "

" To guarantee the individual maximum freedom within a social frame of minimal laws ensures - if not happiness - its hopeful pursuit. "

" Harvard has enough panegyrists without me. "

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

" New York is a city with virtually no habitable public space - only private spaces expensively maintained within the general disaster. "

" Golf appeals to the idiot in us and the child. Just how childlike golf players become is proven by their frequent inability to count past five. "

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

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

" Writing criticism is to writing fiction and poetry as hugging the shore is to sailing in the open sea. "

" There's something very reassuring... about the written record. "

" We take our bearings, daily, from others. To be sane is, to a great extent, to be sociable. "

" The first breath of adultery is the freest; after it, constraints aping marriage develop. "

" My attempt has been really to, beyond making a record of contemporary life, which is what you inevitably do, is trying to make beautiful books - books that are in some way beautiful, that are models of how to use the language, models of honest feeling, models of care. "

" 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. "

" From infancy on, we are all spies; the shame is not this but that the secrets to be discovered are so paltry and few. "

" Publishers are looking for blockbusters - all the world loves a megaseller. "

" All cartoonists are geniuses, but Arnold Roth is especially so. "

" Some golfers, we are told, enjoy the landscape; but properly, the landscape shrivels and compresses into the grim, surrealistically vivid patch of grass directly under the golfer's eyes as he morosely walks toward where he thinks his ball might be. "

" We are drawn to artists who tell us that art is difficult to do and takes a spiritual effort, because we are still puritan enough to respect a strenuous spiritual effort. "

" American art in general... takes to surreal exaggerations and metaphors; but its Puritan work ethic has little use for the playful self-indulgence behind Parisian Surrealism. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" I was trying to support a family with writing. I didn't have a private income. I had no other profession. "

" If my mother hadn't been trying to be a writer, I don't know if I would have thought of it myself. "

" Toni Morrison has a habit, perhaps traceable to the pernicious influence of William Faulkner, of plunging into the narrative before the reader has a clue to what is going on. "

" The refusal to rest content, the willingness to risk excess on behalf of one's obsessions, is what distinguishes artists from entertainers, and what makes some artists adventurers on behalf of us all. "

" There's almost nothing worse to live with than a struggling artist. "

" 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. "

" 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.' "

" There should always be something gratuitous about art, just as there seems to be, according to the new-wave cosmologists, something gratuitous about the universe. "