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" I would write ads for deodorants or labels for catsup bottles if I had to. "

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" The miracle of turning inklings into thoughts and thoughts into words and words into metal and print and ink never palls for me. "

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

" Arabic is very twisting, very beautiful. The call to prayer is quite haunting; it almost makes you a believer on the spot. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" I have never liked haircuts. "

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

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

" Any activity becomes creative when the doer cares about doing it right or better. "

" Existence itself does not feel horrible; it feels like an ecstasy, rather, which we have only to be still to experience. "

" Fiction is burdened for me with a sense of duty. "

" I love my government not least for the extent to which it leaves me alone. "

" New York, like the Soviet Union, has this universal usefulness: It makes you glad you live elsewhere. "

" My father taught only math. "

" 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. "

" My transition from wanting to be a cartoonist to wanting to be a writer may have come about through that friendly opposition, that even-handed pairing, of pictures and words. "

" When you sit at your desk, if you're lucky, there's a moment when you feel empowered to be someone or something else, to leap into another skin. "

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

" In my first 15 or 20 years of authorship, I was almost never asked to give a speech or an interview. The written work was supposed to speak for itself, and to sell itself, sometimes even without the author's photograph on the back flap. "

" A house, having been willfully purchased and furnished, tells us more than a body, and its description is a foremost resource of the art of fiction. "

" The writer must face the fact that ordinary lives are what most people live most of the time, and that the novel as a narration of the fantastic and the adventurous is really an escapist plot; that aesthetically, the ordinary, the banal, is what you must deal with. "

" People are incorrigibly themselves. "

" Gods don't answer letters. "

" Rain is grace; rain is the sky descending to the earth; without rain, there would be no life. "

" Art is like baby shoes. When you coat them with gold, they can no longer be worn. "

" 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. "

" The Internet doesn't like you to learn too much about explosives. "

" Smaller than a breadbox, bigger than a TV remote, the average book fits into the human hand with a seductive nestling, a kiss of texture, whether of cover cloth, glazed jacket, or flexible paperback. "

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