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" Once you realize just the sort of glut of books that exists out there, it does become incumbent on you not to add to it unless you have a damn good reason. "

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" Size has nothing to do with literature. All legs are long enough to touch the ground, and all books are big enough to fill their covers. "

" I've noticed that the few times I've traveled first class myself, you've already got your drink, and your coat has been taken by the time the rest of the passengers file on, and it's hard not to feel sorry for them. They're sort of trooping past you like cows to slaughter and you're sitting there in your, you know, wide-body seat. "

" What is it in people, or just in people like me, that would rather let a lie go by, would rather wish it away or minimize it, than point it out and cause the liar embarrassment? "

" I had the impression from reading English literature that British women were great beauties, and I only had seen Julie Christie, and she was gorgeous and sexy. I don't know whether it was just my taste, but when I got to London, I went two years without seeing a truly attractive woman. A lot of near misses. "

" Writing about the future and the past is less a way of dramatizing change than of showing, by way of contrast, what abides. "

" When I was writing about the Republican primaries, it was as though the Bible was a black box that people reached into to pull out edicts and prejudices and rules and opinions, and I wish they had fact-checked it! Especially Rick Santorum. "

" We want to believe that we're invulnerable, and that people who get tricked deserve it. Well, they don't. And someday the arrogant types who mock the gullible are likely to get their turn to wear the dunce cap. "

" You're able to do things in novels: introduce subplots, other characters, thematic layers and so on, in a way that you simply can't in a movie. A movie really has to choose its battles. "

" Short stories are fiction's R & D department, and failed or less-than-conclusive experiments are not just to be expected but to be hoped for. "

" If writers, like comedians or singers, could only hear themselves bombing as they worked, it's likely that certain books would be cut short after the first few leaden sentences. "

" I've been around - having gone to Princeton, and I went to Oxford after that - some pretty fancy characters in my life. And they're just as nutty as the rest of us - sometimes worse. "

" On the Web, we can be whoever we wish to be, editing the face we show to others in ways that aren't possible in physical space. We can also fine-tune the complexity and depth of our interactions and relationships. "

" It's been a concern of mine for years that the mainstream media coverage of culture and politics takes place in two nodes, Washington and New York, and yet all the voting goes on somewhere else. "

" I review books as a day job, and through the years I've come to view the contemporary memoir as, almost always, a saga of victimization, sometimes by others, sometimes by the self, and sometimes by illness or misfortune, leading, like clockwork, to healing and redemption. "

" When I shoot at the range, I don't feel personally powerful but like the custodian of something powerful. I feel like a successful disciplinarian of something radically alien and potent. Analyze this sensation all you want; you still can't make it go away. "

" A writer is someone who tells you one thing so someday he can tell his readers another thing: what he was thinking but declined to say, or what he would have thought had he been wiser. A writer turns his life into material, and if you're in his life, he uses yours, too. "

" I say 'here's the thing' a lot, both to alert people that I'm about to say something important and to give myself a moment to figure out what that important thing might be, because my head is so often completely empty. "

" I like to think that I could praise the good book of someone I personally dislike. I try not to comment on the person, to be insulting, but I have no trouble being insulting to the work. "

" Everyone his own cinematographer. His own stream-of-consciousness e-mail poet. His own nightclub DJ. His own political columnist. His own biographer of his top-10 friends! "

" Stopping to think is fine for characters, but not for their creators. They have to work. "

" Literary dementia seems dated now, but there was a time when a month in the funny farm was as de rigueur for budding writers as an M.F.A. is now. To be sent away was a badge of honor; to undergo electroshock, a glorious martyrdom. "

" Ask Jeeves! Who ever used that thing? College freshmen to find out who Goethe was - that's it. "

" One of the saddest things about publishing is how quickly it ages what it touches. The frenzy involved in getting books on shelves, and in putting the word out that they're there, moves at a speed that is not the speed of writing, let alone of reading. "

" Truth is stranger than nonfiction. And life is too interesting to be left to journalists. People have stories, but journalists have 'takes,' and it's their takes that usually win out when the stories are too complicated or, as happens, not complicated enough. "

" Here's how adaptation works - almost everything in the movie is in the book in some form. But it's as though the deck has been completely reshuffled and some of the cards have been assigned different values, some of the fours have been made into jacks, and some of the jacks have been made into twos. "

" Horror and panic themselves are forms of violence, and diminishing them, restricting their dimensions, is itself a civilizing act. "

" I think people get a sense of possibility when they're on a plane, even romantic possibility, wondering if the perfect person is going to sit down next to them or something. "

" The strange anthropological lesson of social media is that human beings, if given a choice, often prefer to socialize alone. "

" In the age of networked everything, life moves sideways and covers lots of ground while barely touching the earth. "

" Cross the wrong state border with your gun, or wake up one morning to new legislation or a new presidential executive order, and suddenly you're the bad guy, not the good guy. No wonder some gun owners seem so touchy; they feel, at some level, like criminals in waiting. "