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" Making fake biography, false history, concocting a half-imaginary existence out of the actual drama of my life is my life. "

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

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

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

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

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

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

" I work all day, morning and afternoon, just about every day. If I sit there like that for two or three years, at the end I have a book. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

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

" If I don't measure up as an American writer, at least leave me to my delusion. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" I'm not good at finding 'encouraging' features in American culture. I doubt that aesthetic literacy has much of a future here. "

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

" 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. "

" Old age isn't a battle; old age is a massacre. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" Nothing keeps its promise. "

" To read a novel requires a certain amount of concentration, focus, devotion to the reading. If you read a novel in more than two weeks, you don't read the novel, really. "

" 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. "

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

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

" 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 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. "

" 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. "