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" My generation was maybe the last in which you could set up shop as a writer and hope to make a living at it. "

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" My reading as a child was lazy and cowardly, and it is yet. I was afraid of encountering, in a book, something I didn't want to know. "

" We are most alive when we're in love. "

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" Some golfers, we are told, enjoy the landscape; but properly, the landscape shrivels and compresses into the grim, surrealistically vivid patch of grass directly under the golfer's eyes as he morosely walks toward where he thinks his ball might be. "

" The Internet doesn't like you to learn too much about explosives. "

" Imagine writing a poem with a sweating, worried-looking boy handing you a different pencil at the end of every word. My golf, you may say, is no poem; nevertheless, I keep wanting it to be one. "

" I love Shillington not as one loves Capri or New York, because they are special, but as one loves one's own body and consciousness, because they are synonymous with being. "

" If my mother hadn't been trying to be a writer, I don't know if I would have thought of it myself. "

" 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. "

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

" Harvard has enough panegyrists without me. "

" I seem to have this need to belong to some church. I get worried on Sunday mornings. "

" The firmest house in my fiction, probably, is the little thick-walled sandstone farmhouse of 'The Centaur' and 'Of the Farm'; I had lived in that house, and can visualize every floorboard and bit of worn molding. "

" 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.' "

" Every marriage tends to consist of an aristocrat and a peasant. Of a teacher and a learner. "

" A healthy male adult bore consumes each year one and a half times his own weight in other people's patience. "

" The theme of old age doesn't seem to fascinate Hollywood. "

" Art is like baby shoes. When you coat them with gold, they can no longer be worn. "

" My interest generally is the hidden Americans; the ones who live far away from the headlines. "

" In fiction, imaginary people become realer to us than any named celebrity glimpsed in a series of rumored events, whose causes and subtler ramifications must remain in the dark. An invented figure like Anna Karenina or Emma Bovary emerges fully into the light of understanding, which brings with it identification, sympathy and pity. "

" 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. "

" My transition from wanting to be a cartoonist to wanting to be a writer may have come about through that friendly opposition, that even-handed pairing, of pictures and words. "

" Inspiration arrives as a packet of material to be delivered. "

" Celebrity is a mask that eats into the face. "

" Publishers are looking for blockbusters - all the world loves a megaseller. "

" A lot of the Koran does not speak very eloquently to a Westerner. Much of it is either legalistic or opaquely poetic. "

" We're past the age of heroes and hero kings... Most of our lives are basically mundane and dull, and it's up to the writer to find ways to make them interesting. "

" My actinic keratosis is a result of the triumphalism of the beach. The sun exacerbates it. "

" I don't know; I think I'd be gloomy without some faith that there is a purpose and there is a kind of witness to my life. "

" Golf at its measured pace permits an electric excess of mental activity. "

" Until the 20th century it was generally assumed that a writer had said what he had to say in his works. "