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" In any interview, you do say more or less than you mean. "

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" I was raised in the Depression, when there was a great sense of dog-eat-dog and people fighting over scraps. "

" Now that I am sixty, I see why the idea of elder wisdom has passed from currency. "

" 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. "

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" I think you remember certain phrases from bad reviews. You don't remember all the bad reviews. "

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

" The lust to meet authors ranks low, I think, on the roll of holy appetites; but it is an authentic pang. "

" I don't write about too many male businessmen, and I'm not apt to write about too many female businessmen. "

" There's a crystallization that goes on in a poem which the young man can bring off, but which the middle-aged man can't. "

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

" I see no intrinsic reason why a doubly talented artist might not arise and create a comic-strip novel masterpiece. "

" Four years was enough of Harvard. I still had a lot to learn, but had been given the liberating notion that now I could teach myself. "

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" There is a great deal of busywork to a writer's life, as to a professor's life, a great deal of work that matters only in that, if you don't do it, your desk becomes very full of papers. So, there is a lot of letter answering and a certain amount of speaking, though I try to keep that at a minimum. "

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