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

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" I've always tried to write about America. It's very worth a writer's effort. "

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

" 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. "

" I like short stories. "

" 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. "

" Every marriage tends to consist of an aristocrat and a peasant. Of a teacher and a learner. "

" By the time a partnership dissolves, it has dissolved. "

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

" For some of us, books are intrinsic to our sense of personal identity. "

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

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

" The essential self is innocent, and when it tastes its own innocence knows that it lives for ever. "

" 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. "

" I'm trying to get the terrorist out of the bugaboo category and into the category of a fellow human being. "

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

" We do survive every moment, after all, except the last one. "

" In leaving New York in 1957, I did leave without regret the literary demimonde of agents and would-be's and with-it nonparticipants; this world seemed unnutritious and interfering. "

" 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. "

" I picked up 'On Moral Fiction' in the bookstore and looked up myself in the index, but I didn't read it through. I try not to read things that depress me. "

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

" I have never liked haircuts. "

" 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. "

" The writer must face the fact that ordinary lives are what most people live most of the time, and that the novel as a narration of the fantastic and the adventurous is really an escapist plot; that aesthetically, the ordinary, the banal, is what you must deal with. "

" Some golfers, we are told, enjoy the landscape; but properly, the landscape shrivels and compresses into the grim, surrealistically vivid patch of grass directly under the golfer's eyes as he morosely walks toward where he thinks his ball might be. "

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

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

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