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" Suffering isn't a moral endowment. People don't always do well under duress, and it seemed to me to be truer to a fellow in that situation to make him angry. "

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" It seems to me that in literature, books have always been answers to other books. "

" When you're writing a book, you don't really think about it critically. You don't want to know too well what you're doing. First, you write the book, then you find the justification for it. "

" My sense of what a book should be has changed so radically. I like to think for the better. "

" Congress is so beholden to the money that any solution in the general interest will be frustrated and subverted by the corporate interests who feel they will be damaged by progress, fair play and justice. "

" From my undergraduate days, I've always been interested in the major philosophical questions that don't seem to have an answer that everyone agrees on. "

" When you're working well, you don't do research. Whatever you need comes to you. "

" I did have a feeling then that the culture of factuality was so dominating that storytelling had lost all its authority. "

" Writing is immensely difficult. The short forms especially. "

" If we ever find out how the brain works, with all its complexity, then we will be able to build a machine that has consciousness. And if that happens, that is a road to planetary disaster because everything we've thought about ourselves, since the Bronze Age, the Bible, all of that will be gone. "

" I'm not the sort of writer who can walk into a party and take a look around, see who's sleeping with whom and go home and write a novel about society. It's not the way I work. "

" The important thing is not to be too comfortable when you're writing. Noise in the street? That's good. The computer goes down? That's good. All these things are good. It has to be a little bit of a struggle. "

" The writer isn't made in a vacuum. Writers are witnesses. The reason we need writers is because we need witnesses to this terrifying century. "

" Writing is like driving at night in the fog. You can only see as far as your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way. "

" People come out of the mid-west and go to the Ivy League. I kind of reversed the direction. "

" Washington is designed not to solve problems. Congress is so beholden to the money that any solution in the general interest will be frustrated and subverted by the corporate interests who feel they will be damaged by progress, fair play and justice. "

" I got married very early, and in no time at all, we had three children. And it seemed to me I had an obligation to support them. "

" Here's how it goes: I'm up at the stroke of 10 or 10:30. I have breakfast and read the papers, and then it's lunchtime. Then maybe a little nap after lunch and out to the gym, and before I know it, it's time to have a drink. "

" One of the things I had to learn as a writer was to trust the act of writing. To put myself in the position of writing to find out what I was writing. "

" Planning to write is not writing. Outlining, researching, talking to people about what you're doing, none of that is writing. Writing is writing. "

" There are two books that impressed me when I was very young. One was 'The Adventures of Augie March' - the idea of having something so generous, and so adventurous and improvisatory. The other was 'The U.S.A. Trilogy,' by John Dos Passos. "

" My father was the proprietor of a music shop on Forty-third Street, where many of the finest performers and musicians of the day would come to shop. He knew the classical repertoire inside out. "

" To have the regard of one's peers is immensely moving. "

" Things that appear on the front page of the newspaper as 'fact' are far more dangerous than the games played by a novelist, and can lead to wars. "

" I try to avoid experience if I can. Most experience is bad. "

" Obama is a great man who's just beginning to understand the realities. And I'm not just saying that because he reads my books. I would have voted for him anyway. "

" There is no longer any such thing as fiction or nonfiction; there's only narrative. "

" I like to think of myself as an unmediated novelist - or perhaps a national novelist. "

" When I'm writing, I like to seal everything off and face the wall, not to look outside the window. The only way out is through the sentences. "

" Writers are not just people who sit down and write. They hazard themselves. Every time you compose a book your composition of yourself is at stake. "

" My theory about why Hemingway killed himself is that he heard his own voice; that he reached the point where he couldn't write without feeling he was repeating himself. That's the worst thing that can happen to a writer. "