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

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" But for a few phrases from his letters and an odd line or two of his verse, the poet walks gagged through his own biography. "

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

" Smaller than a breadbox, bigger than a TV remote, the average book fits into the human hand with a seductive nestling, a kiss of texture, whether of cover cloth, glazed jacket, or flexible paperback. "

" In art, anything goes, and if it goes, it goes. "

" New York is a city with virtually no habitable public space - only private spaces expensively maintained within the general disaster. "

" A narrative is like a room on whose walls a number of false doors have been painted; while within the narrative, we have many apparent choices of exit, but when the author leads us to one particular door, we know it is the right one because it opens. "

" My complaint, as an exile who once loved New York and who likes to return a half-dozen times a year, is not that it plays host to extremes of the human condition: There is grandeur in that, and necessity. "

" American art in general... takes to surreal exaggerations and metaphors; but its Puritan work ethic has little use for the playful self-indulgence behind Parisian Surrealism. "

" My last vivid boyhood fright from books came when I was 15; I was visiting my uncle and aunt in Greenwich, and, emboldened by my success with 'The Waste Land,' I opened their copy of 'Ulysses.' The whiff of death off those remorseless, closely written pages overpowered me. So: back to soluble mysteries, and jokes that were not cosmic. "

" My golf is so delicate, so tenuously wired together with silent inward prayers, exhortations and unstable visualizations, that the sheer pressure of an additional pair of eyes crumbles the whole rickety structure into rubble. "

" We take our bearings, daily, from others. To be sane is, to a great extent, to be sociable. "

" For some of us, books are intrinsic to our sense of personal identity. "

" Sex is like money; only too much is enough. "

" A seventeenth-century house tends to be short on frills like hallways and closets; you must improvise. "

" 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. "

" Reagan has turned America into a tax haven. "

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

" New York is, of course, many cities, and an exile does not return to the one he left. "

" For many years, I read mystery novels for relaxation. But my tastes were too narrow - and, having read all of Agatha Christie and John Dickson Carr, I discovered that the implausibility and the thinness of the people distracted me unduly from the plot. "

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

" There is a great deal of busywork to a writer's life, as to a professor's life, a great deal of work that matters only in that, if you don't do it, your desk becomes very full of papers. So, there is a lot of letter answering and a certain amount of speaking, though I try to keep that at a minimum. "

" As movers and the moved both know, books are heavy freight, the weight of refrigerators and sofas broken up into cardboard boxes. They make us think twice about changing addresses. "

" 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.' "

" To be President of the United States, sir, is to act as advocate for a blind, venomous, and ungrateful client. "

" Authors should be honored only for their works. "

" I find in my own writing that only fiction - and rarely, a poem - fully tests me to the kind of limits of what I know and what I feel. "

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

" Bookstores are lonely forts, spilling light onto the sidewalk. They civilize their neighborhoods. "

" 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. "

" I was raised in the Depression, when there was a great sense of dog-eat-dog and people fighting over scraps. "