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" Our artistic heroes tend to be those self-exercisers, like Picasso, and Nabokov, and Wallace Stevens, who rather defiantly kept playing past dark. "

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" All cartoonists are geniuses, but Arnold Roth is especially so. "

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

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

" The inner spaces that a good story lets us enter are the old apartments of religion. "

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

" In my first 15 or 20 years of authorship, I was almost never asked to give a speech or an interview. The written work was supposed to speak for itself, and to sell itself, sometimes even without the author's photograph on the back flap. "

" 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. "

" Without books, we might just melt into the airwaves and be just another set of blips. "

" I would write ads for deodorants or labels for catsup bottles if I had to. "

" The writers we tend to universally admire, like Beckett, or Kafka, or TS Eliot, are not very prolific. "

" 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 should mention something that nobody ever thinks about, but proofreading takes a lot of time. After you write something, there are these proofs that keep coming, and there's this panicky feeling that 'This is me and I must make it better.' "

" Four years was enough of Harvard. I still had a lot to learn, but had been given the liberating notion that now I could teach myself. "

" Writing makes you more human. "

" 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 cinema has done more for my spiritual life than the church. My ideas of fame, success and beauty all originate from the big screen. Whereas Christian religion is retreating everywhere and losing more and more influence; film has filled the vacuum and supports us with myths and action-controlling images. "

" 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. "

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

" Reminiscence and self-parody are part of remaining true to oneself. "

" My father taught only math. "

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

" I have never liked haircuts. "

" In any interview, you do say more or less than you mean. "

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

" The study of literature threatens to become a kind of paleontology of failure, and criticism a supercilious psychoanalysis of authors. "

" All love comes from the family. "

" To guarantee the individual maximum freedom within a social frame of minimal laws ensures - if not happiness - its hopeful pursuit. "

" Most of American life consists of driving somewhere and then returning home, wondering why the hell you went. "

" Sometimes it seems the whole purpose of pets is to bring death into the house. "

" 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. "