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" 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. "

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" 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. "

" Literature isn't a moral beauty contest. Its power arises from the authority and audacity with which the impersonation is pulled off; the belief it inspires is what counts. "

" Let me tell you about the nap. It's absolutely fantastic. When I was a kid, my father was always trying to tell me how to be a man. And he said - I was maybe nine - he said, 'Philip, whenever you take a nap, take your clothes off and put a blanket over you, and you're going to sleep better.' Well, as with everything, he was right. "

" Nothing keeps its promise. "

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

" 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. "

" Is an intelligent human being likely to be much more than a large-scale manufacturer of misunderstanding? "

Misunderstanding

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

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

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

" The road to hell is paved with works-in-progress. "

" All that we don't know is astonishing. Even more astonishing is what passes for knowing. "

" I don't know any writer for whom it comes easily. Maybe John Updike - a story would just seem to come to him whole, you know, out of a personal experience. But the rest of us, I think, are not so lucky, and I had to work hard, yeah. "

" 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. "

" People are unjust to anger - it can be enlivening and a lot of fun. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

" A writer has to be driven crazy to help him to see. A writer needs his poisons. "

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

" For me, the passing of time has provided me with subjects I never had before. Subjects I can now look at from a historical perspective. Like the anti-communist era in America. I lived through that. I was a boy; I didn't find a way to write about it until many years later. The same with the Vietnam War. "

" 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. "

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

" I needed my life as a springboard for my fiction. I have to have something solid under my feet when I write. I'm not a fantasist. I bounce up and down on the diving board, and I go into the water of fiction. But I've got to begin in life so I can pump life into it throughout. "

" The novelist's obsession, moment by moment, is with language: finding the right next word. "