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

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" There should always be something gratuitous about art, just as there seems to be, according to the new-wave cosmologists, something gratuitous about the universe. "

" Hobbies take place in the cellar and smell of airplane glue. "

" Old age treats freelance writers pretty gently. "

" The essential support and encouragement comes from within, arising out of the mad notion that your society needs to know what only you can tell it. "

" Harvard has enough panegyrists without me. "

" It's so hard to make a good tee shot after a birdie. "

" 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. "

" I don't think women are dumb. "

" 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.' "

" Gods don't answer letters. "

" Perhaps I have written fiction because everything unambiguously expressed seems somehow crass to me; and when the subject is myself, I want to jeer and weep. "

" John Barth, I think, was really a writer of my own age and somewhat of my own temperament, although his books are very different from mine, and he has been a spokesman for the very ambitious, long, rather academic novel. But I don't think that what he is saying, so far as I understand it, is so very different from what I'm saying. "

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

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

" My first ambition was to be an animator for Walt Disney. Then I wanted to be a magazine cartoonist. "

" 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. "

" My wife and I had children when we were children ourselves. "

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

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

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

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

" The inner spaces that a good story lets us enter are the old apartments of religion. "

" 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. "

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" The reader knows the writer better than he knows himself; but the writer's physical presence is light from a star that has moved on. "

" 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. "

" 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. "