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

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" America is beyond power; it acts as in a dream, as a face of God. Wherever America is, there is freedom, and wherever America is not, madness rules with chains, darkness strangles millions. Beneath her patient bombers, paradise is possible. "

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

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

" Billy Collins writes lovely poems. Limpid, gently and consistently startling, more serious than they seem, they describe all the worlds that are and were and some others besides. "

" 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. "

" I like short stories. "

" The essential support and encouragement comes from within, arising out of the mad notion that your society needs to know what only you can tell it. "

" When I write, I aim in my mind not toward New York but toward a vague spot a little to the east of Kansas. "

" A room containing Philip Roth, I have noticed, begins hilariously to whirl and pulse with a mix of rebelliousness and constriction that I take to be Oedipal. "

" 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. "

" The refusal to rest content, the willingness to risk excess on behalf of one's obsessions, is what distinguishes artists from entertainers, and what makes some artists adventurers on behalf of us all. "

" People are incorrigibly themselves. "

" That a marriage ends is less than ideal; but all things end under heaven, and if temporality is held to be invalidating, then nothing real succeeds. "

" If the worst comes true, and the paper book joins the papyrus scroll and parchment codex in extinction, we will miss, I predict, a number of things about it. "

" Harvard has enough panegyrists without me. "

" Eros is everywhere. It is what binds. "

" There's almost nothing worse to live with than a struggling artist. "

" If men do not keep on speaking terms with children, they cease to be men, and become merely machines for eating and for earning money. "

" Each morning my characters greet me with misty faces willing, though chilled, to muster for another day's progress through the dazzling quicksand the marsh of blank paper. "

" In a city like New York, you're aware of the rich and poor. "

" My first ambition was to be an animator for Walt Disney. Then I wanted to be a magazine cartoonist. "

" John Barth, I think, was really a writer of my own age and somewhat of my own temperament, although his books are very different from mine, and he has been a spokesman for the very ambitious, long, rather academic novel. But I don't think that what he is saying, so far as I understand it, is so very different from what I'm saying. "

" I never really made a choice to live in America, so I should be aware of the social strata outside of the ones that I may live in. "

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

" The substance of fictional architecture is not bricks and mortar but evanescent consciousness. "

" From infancy on, we are all spies; the shame is not this but that the secrets to be discovered are so paltry and few. "

" The first breath of adultery is the freest; after it, constraints aping marriage develop. "

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

" I think you remember certain phrases from bad reviews. You don't remember all the bad reviews. "

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