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" People are incorrigibly themselves. "

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" Fiction is burdened for me with a sense of duty. "

" I suppose sequels are inevitable for a writer of a certain age. "

" Americans have been conditioned to respect newness, whatever it costs them. "

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

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

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

" 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. "

" I don't think women are dumb. "

" Mars has long exerted a pull on the human imagination. The erratically moving red star in the sky was seen as sinister or violent by the ancients: The Greeks identified it with Ares, the god of war; the Babylonians named it after Nergal, god of the underworld. To the ancient Chinese, it was Ying-huo, the fire planet. "

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

" Writing criticism is to writing fiction and poetry as hugging the shore is to sailing in the open sea. "

" My life is, in a sense, trash. My life is only that of which the residue is my writing. "

" 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. "

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

" 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.' "

" In fiction, imaginary people become realer to us than any named celebrity glimpsed in a series of rumored events, whose causes and subtler ramifications must remain in the dark. An invented figure like Anna Karenina or Emma Bovary emerges fully into the light of understanding, which brings with it identification, sympathy and pity. "

" 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. "

" I love my government not least for the extent to which it leaves me alone. "

" We're past the age of heroes and hero kings... Most of our lives are basically mundane and dull, and it's up to the writer to find ways to make them interesting. "

" If my mother hadn't been trying to be a writer, I don't know if I would have thought of it myself. "

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

" Being naked approaches being revolutionary; going barefoot is mere populism. "

" 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. "

" What interests me is why men think of women as witches. It's because they're so fascinating and exasperating, so other. "

" My actinic keratosis is a result of the triumphalism of the beach. The sun exacerbates it. "

" Writing makes you more human. "

" Golf appeals to the idiot in us and the child. Just how childlike golf players become is proven by their frequent inability to count past five. "

" 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. "

" I didn't need to write historical epics, no, or science fiction, though I read a lot of science fiction as a kid and rather liked it. But I didn't have the mentality. "

" An aging writer has the not insignificant satisfaction of a shelf of books behind him that, as they wait for their ideal readers to discover them, will outlast him for a while. "