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" 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.' "

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" 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. "

" The study of literature threatens to become a kind of paleontology of failure, and criticism a supercilious psychoanalysis of authors. "

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

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

" The inner spaces that a good story lets us enter are the old apartments of religion. "

" Creativity is merely a plus name for regular activity. Any activity becomes creative when the doer cares about doing it right, or better. "

" In becoming an icon, it is useful to die young. "

" Sometimes it seems the whole purpose of pets is to bring death into the house. "

" Writing makes you more human. "

" Celebrity is a mask that eats into the face. "

" What art offers is space - a certain breathing room for the spirit. "

" 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. "

" It is in middles that extremes clash, where ambiguity restlessly rules. "

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

" It's sort of good to see your vocation as a daily task and have fairly modest expectations for financial or reward in other coin - glory, love, whatever. "

" The reader knows the writer better than he knows himself; but the writer's physical presence is light from a star that has moved on. "

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

" If men do not keep on speaking terms with children, they cease to be men, and become merely machines for eating and for earning money. "

" 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. "

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

" Customs and convictions change; respectable people are the last to know, or to admit, the change, and the ones most offended by fresh reflections of the facts in the mirror of art. "

" Professionalism in art has this difficulty: To be professional is to be dependable, to be dependable is to be predictable, and predictability is esthetically boring - an anti-virtue in a field where we hope to be astonished and startled and at some deep level refreshed. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" America is beyond power; it acts as in a dream, as a face of God. Wherever America is, there is freedom, and wherever America is not, madness rules with chains, darkness strangles millions. Beneath her patient bombers, paradise is possible. "

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