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

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

" I suppose sequels are inevitable for a writer of a certain age. "

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

" My interest generally is the hidden Americans; the ones who live far away from the headlines. "

" 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. "

" My life is, in a sense, trash. My life is only that of which the residue is my writing. "

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

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

" If the worst comes true, and the paper book joins the papyrus scroll and parchment codex in extinction, we will miss, I predict, a number of things about it. "

" Eros is everywhere. It is what binds. "

" 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. "

" Americans have been conditioned to respect newness, whatever it costs them. "

" Golf's ultimate moral instruction directs us to find within ourselves a pivotal center of enjoyment: relax into a rhythm that fits the hills and swales, and play the shot at hand - not the last one, or the next one, but the one at your feet, in the poison ivy, where you put it. "

" Baseball skills schizophrenically encompass a pitcher's, a batter's and a fielder's. "

" For male and female alike, the bodies of the other sex are messages signaling what we must do, they are glowing signifiers of our own necessities. "

" 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. "

" Truth should not be forced; it should simply manifest itself, like a woman who has in her privacy reflected and coolly decided to bestow herself upon a certain man. "

" For a long time, I was under the impression that 'Terry and the Pirates' was the best comic strip in the United States. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

" An affair wants to spill, to share its glory with the world. No act is so private it does not seek applause. "

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

" Being naked approaches being revolutionary; going barefoot is mere populism. "

" In leaving New York in 1957, I did leave without regret the literary demimonde of agents and would-be's and with-it nonparticipants; this world seemed unnutritious and interfering. "

" A Christian novelist tries to describe the world as it is. "

" In fiction, imaginary people become realer to us than any named celebrity glimpsed in a series of rumored events, whose causes and subtler ramifications must remain in the dark. An invented figure like Anna Karenina or Emma Bovary emerges fully into the light of understanding, which brings with it identification, sympathy and pity. "

" 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. "