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

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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.' "

" I must say, when I reread myself, it's the poetry I tend to look at. It's the most exciting to write, and it's over the quickest. "

" When I write, I aim in my mind not toward New York but toward a vague spot a little to the east of Kansas. "

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

" Humor is my default mode. "

" My reading as a child was lazy and cowardly, and it is yet. I was afraid of encountering, in a book, something I didn't want to know. "

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

" 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. "

" For whatever crispness and animation my writing has I give some credit to the cartoonist manque. "

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

" My golf is so delicate, so tenuously wired together with silent inward prayers, exhortations and unstable visualizations, that the sheer pressure of an additional pair of eyes crumbles the whole rickety structure into rubble. "

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

" It is not an aesthetic misstep to make the viewer aware of the paint and the painter's hand. Such an empathetic awareness lies at the heart of aesthetic appreciation. "

" Old age treats freelance writers pretty gently. "

" Government is either organized benevolence or organized madness; its peculiar magnitude permits no shading. "

" I know more about what it's like to be elderly and infirm and kind of stupid, the way you get forgetful, but on the other hand I'm a littler, wiser, dare we say? The word 'wisdom' has kind of faded out of our vocabulary, but yeah, I'm a little wiser. "

" Writers may be disreputable, incorrigible, early to decay or late to bloom but they dare to go it alone. "

" My father taught only math. "

" 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. "

" That a marriage ends is less than ideal; but all things end under heaven, and if temporality is held to be invalidating, then nothing real succeeds. "

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

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

" 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. "

" In tennis, there is the forehand, the backhand, the overhead smash and the drop volley, all with a different grip. "

" 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. "

" What interests me is why men think of women as witches. It's because they're so fascinating and exasperating, so other. "

" Every marriage tends to consist of an aristocrat and a peasant. Of a teacher and a learner. "

" Belief, like love, must be voluntary. "

" 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. "

" Most of American life consists of driving somewhere and then returning home, wondering why the hell you went. "