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" 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. "

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" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" For a long time, I was under the impression that 'Terry and the Pirates' was the best comic strip in the United States. "

" Hobbies take place in the cellar and smell of airplane glue. "

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

" Creativity is merely a plus name for regular activity. Any activity becomes creative when the doer cares about doing it right, or better. "

" Harvard has enough panegyrists without me. "

" My generation was maybe the last in which you could set up shop as a writer and hope to make a living at it. "

" By the mid-17th century, telescopes had improved enough to make visible the seasonally growing and shrinking polar ice caps on Mars, and features such as Syrtis Major, a dark patch thought to be a shallow sea. "

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

" Most Americans haven't had my happy experience of living for thirteen years in a seventeenth-century house, since most of America lacks seventeenth-century houses. "

" 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. "

" A leader is one who, out of madness or goodness, volunteers to take upon himself the woe of the people. There are few men so foolish, hence the erratic quality of leadership in the world. "

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

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

" We take our bearings, daily, from others. To be sane is, to a great extent, to be sociable. "

" Any activity becomes creative when the doer cares about doing it right or better. "

" It's sort of good to see your vocation as a daily task and have fairly modest expectations for financial or reward in other coin - glory, love, whatever. "

" For male and female alike, the bodies of the other sex are messages signaling what we must do, they are glowing signifiers of our own necessities. "

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

" Smaller than a breadbox, bigger than a TV remote, the average book fits into the human hand with a seductive nestling, a kiss of texture, whether of cover cloth, glazed jacket, or flexible paperback. "

" Truth should not be forced; it should simply manifest itself, like a woman who has in her privacy reflected and coolly decided to bestow herself upon a certain man. "

" People are incorrigibly themselves. "

" 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. "

" Arabic is very twisting, very beautiful. The call to prayer is quite haunting; it almost makes you a believer on the spot. "

" 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. "

" When I went away to college, I marveled at the wealth of bookstores around Harvard Square. "

" My transition from wanting to be a cartoonist to wanting to be a writer may have come about through that friendly opposition, that even-handed pairing, of pictures and words. "

" 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. "