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" New York, like the Soviet Union, has this universal usefulness: It makes you glad you live elsewhere. "

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

" Professionalism in art has this difficulty: To be professional is to be dependable, to be dependable is to be predictable, and predictability is esthetically boring - an anti-virtue in a field where we hope to be astonished and startled and at some deep level refreshed. "

" 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. "

" The first author I met socially was Joyce Cary. "

" There's a crystallization that goes on in a poem which the young man can bring off, but which the middle-aged man can't. "

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" We don't really want to think that the artist is only very skilled, that he has merely devoted his life to perfecting a certain set of intelligible skills. "

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

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

" 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 feel old only when I look at my hands or at myself in the mirror. "

" 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. "

" Reagan has turned America into a tax haven. "

" Rain is grace; rain is the sky descending to the earth; without rain, there would be no life. "

" 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. "

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

" The good ending dismisses us with a touch of ceremony and throws a backward light of significance over the story just read. It makes it, as they say, or unmakes it. A weak beginning is forgettable, but the end of a story bulks in the reader's mind like the giant foot in a foreshortened photograph. "

" 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. "

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

" Existence itself does not feel horrible; it feels like an ecstasy, rather, which we have only to be still to experience. "

" 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. "

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

" Perhaps I have written fiction because everything unambiguously expressed seems somehow crass to me; and when the subject is myself, I want to jeer and weep. "

" There's something very reassuring... about the written record. "

" Does fiction, artistic writing, have much of a future? I must say it's on the way out. "