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" I thought I would lose, so I didn't prepare a speech. "

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" When you're writing a book, you don't really think about it critically. You don't want to know too well what you're doing. First, you write the book, then you find the justification for it. "

" It seems to me that in literature, books have always been answers to other books. "

" I got married very early, and in no time at all, we had three children. And it seemed to me I had an obligation to support them. "

" From my undergraduate days, I've always been interested in the major philosophical questions that don't seem to have an answer that everyone agrees on. "

" Congress is so beholden to the money that any solution in the general interest will be frustrated and subverted by the corporate interests who feel they will be damaged by progress, fair play and justice. "

" I did have a feeling then that the culture of factuality was so dominating that storytelling had lost all its authority. "

" In the twentieth century one of the most personal relationships to have developed is that of the person and the state. It's become a fact of life that governments have become very intimate with people, most always to their detriment. "

" Somewhere along the line the rhythms and tonalities of music elided in my brain with the sounds that words make and the rhythm that sentences have. "

" There is no longer any such thing as fiction or nonfiction; there's only narrative. "

" The nature of good fiction is that it dwells in ambiguity. "

" To have the regard of one's peers is immensely moving. "

" There are two books that impressed me when I was very young. One was 'The Adventures of Augie March' - the idea of having something so generous, and so adventurous and improvisatory. The other was 'The U.S.A. Trilogy,' by John Dos Passos. "

" Obama is a great man who's just beginning to understand the realities. And I'm not just saying that because he reads my books. I would have voted for him anyway. "

" Planning to write is not writing. Outlining, researching, talking to people about what you're doing, none of that is writing. Writing is writing. "

" Writing is an exploration. You start from nothing and learn as you go. "

" I started on computers with 'Billy Bathgate,' a little orange screen with black letters. I thought it was really cool, but it actually slowed me up for a while because it's so easy to revise, I tended to stay on the same page. I've learned to discipline myself. "

" Books are acts of composition: you compose them. You make music: the music is called fiction. "

" In fiction, you know, there are no borders. You can go anywhere. "

" My theory about why Hemingway killed himself is that he heard his own voice; that he reached the point where he couldn't write without feeling he was repeating himself. That's the worst thing that can happen to a writer. "

" The historian will tell you what happened. The novelist will tell you what it felt like. "

" Suffering isn't a moral endowment. People don't always do well under duress, and it seemed to me to be truer to a fellow in that situation to make him angry. "

" Writers are not just people who sit down and write. They hazard themselves. Every time you compose a book your composition of yourself is at stake. "

" I have a number of vices, one of which is moderation. "

" Each book tends to have its own identity rather than the author's. It speaks from itself rather than you. Each book is unlike the others because you are not bringing the same voice to every book. I think that keeps you alive as a writer. "

" Writing is like driving at night in the fog. You can only see as far as your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way. "

" I discovered Einstein said the same thing about his celebrated theories of relativity that writers say about their work when he said he didn't have any feelings of personal possession of these ideas. Once they were out there, they came from somewhere else. And that's exactly the feeling when you write. You don't feel possessive about it. "

" I try to avoid experience if I can. Most experience is bad. "

" People come out of the mid-west and go to the Ivy League. I kind of reversed the direction. "

" My sense of what a book should be has changed so radically. I like to think for the better. "

" Here's how it goes: I'm up at the stroke of 10 or 10:30. I have breakfast and read the papers, and then it's lunchtime. Then maybe a little nap after lunch and out to the gym, and before I know it, it's time to have a drink. "