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" It was my great problem to solve: how to write a book, you know. And after you write one, you have to write another to prove to yourself you can do it again. "

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" Writing, for me, was a feat of self-preservation. If I did not do it, I would die. So I did it. Obstinacy, not talent, saved my life. "

" I'm not angry; I write about angry characters. When I'm doing that, I'm happy. Just like when I'm writing about Mickey Sabbath being lustful, I'm not feeling lustful; I'm happy. "

" I don't ask writers about their work habits. I really don't care. "

" I said the screen will kill the reader, and it has: the movie screen in the beginning, the television screen, and now the coup de grace, the computer screen. "

" As for the kind of writer I am? I am who I don't pretend to be. "

" I'm an Obama supporter. And if you're an Obama supporter, that means you had a hard time during the Bush years. "

" Just like those who are incurably ill, the aged know everything about their dying except exactly when. "

" My traducers propound my alleged malefaction as though I have spewed venom on women for half a century. But only a madman would go to the trouble of writing 31 books in order to affirm his hatred. "

" At night, I read. I read for two hours. I just finished a marvelous book by Louise Erdrich, 'The Round House.' But mostly I read 20th-century history and biography. I lived then. I was either a child or at school or at work. "

" You write differently in each book. It may appear to be similar to readers, but you're a different writer in each book because you haven't approached that subject before. And every subject brings out a different prose strain in you. Fundamentally, yes, you're contained as one writer. But you have various voices. Like a good actor. "

" Fear tends to manifest itself much more quickly than greed, so volatile markets tend to be on the downside. In up markets, volatility tends to gradually decline. "

" Of course you bank on your experience, but as a sounding board. It isn't that you write down what happens to you every day. You wouldn't be a writer if you did that. "

" I cannot and do not live in the world of discretion, not as a writer, anyway. I would prefer to, I assure you - it would make life easier. But discretion is, unfortunately, not for novelists. "

" Life is just a short period of time in which you are alive. "

" When you publish a book, it's the world's book. The world edits it. "

" I've stopped reading fiction. I don't read it at all. I read other things: history, biography. I don't have the same interest in fiction that I once did. "

" Unless one is inordinately fond of subordination, one is always at war. "

" Sheer Playfulness and Deadly Seriousness are my closest friends. "

" I write fiction and I'm told it's autobiography, I write autobiography and I'm told it's fiction, so since I'm so dim and they're so smart, let them decide what it is or it isn't. "

" Should you protect profits? Yes. But run for the hills? No. "

" Obviously the facts are never just coming at you but are incorporated by an imagination that is formed by your previous experience. Memories of the past are not memories of facts but memories of your imaginings of the facts. "

" A Jewish man with parents alive is a fifteen-year-old boy, and will remain a fifteen-year-old boy until they die! "

" I think I write and publish as often as I do because I can't bear being without a book to work on... I don't feel I have this to say or that to say or this story to tell, but I know I want to be occupied with the writing process while I'm living. "

" Novel-writing is, for the novelist, a game of let's pretend. "

" I have no desire to write fiction. I did what I did, and it's done. There's more to life than writing and publishing fiction. There is another way entirely, amazed as I am to discover it at this late date. "

" With the draft, everybody was involved. Everybody was fodder. When you got to be 21, 22 and graduated from college, for two years your life stopped. If you had been running in the direction of your life, you had to stop and do this other thing which was, if not menacing, just plain boring. "

" For all I know, I am beginning with the ending. My page one can wind up a year later as page two hundred, if it's still even around. "

" A Jew without Jews, without Judaism, without Zionism, without Jewishness, without a temple or an army or even a pistol, a Jew clearly without a home, just the object itself, like a glass or an apple. "

" Writing is frustration - it's daily frustration, not to mention humiliation. It's just like baseball: you fail two-thirds of the time. "

" As I see it, my focus has never been on masculine power rampant and triumphant but rather on the antithesis: masculine power impaired. "