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" That a marriage ends is less than ideal; but all things end under heaven, and if temporality is held to be invalidating, then nothing real succeeds. "

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

" 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. "

" Religion enables us to ignore nothingness and get on with the jobs of life. "

" Bookstores are lonely forts, spilling light onto the sidewalk. They civilize their neighborhoods. "

" I think my first story sold for $550. This was in 1954, and it seemed like quite a lot of money, and I said to myself, 'Hey, I'm a professional writer now.' "

" Toni Morrison has a habit, perhaps traceable to the pernicious influence of William Faulkner, of plunging into the narrative before the reader has a clue to what is going on. "

" 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. "

" 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 healthy male adult bore consumes each year one and a half times his own weight in other people's patience. "

" 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. "

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

" The lust to meet authors ranks low, I think, on the roll of holy appetites; but it is an authentic pang. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

" America is beyond power; it acts as in a dream, as a face of God. Wherever America is, there is freedom, and wherever America is not, madness rules with chains, darkness strangles millions. Beneath her patient bombers, paradise is possible. "

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

" 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. "

" I don't know; I think I'd be gloomy without some faith that there is a purpose and there is a kind of witness to my life. "

" 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. "

" A number of American colleges are willing to pay a tempting amount to pinch and poke an author for a day or two. "

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

" But for a few phrases from his letters and an odd line or two of his verse, the poet walks gagged through his own biography. "

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

" When you sit at your desk, if you're lucky, there's a moment when you feel empowered to be someone or something else, to leap into another skin. "

" Eros is everywhere. It is what binds. "

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

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

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

" 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. "