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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. "

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

" New York, like the Soviet Union, has this universal usefulness: It makes you glad you live elsewhere. "

" My wife and I had children when we were children ourselves. "

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

" Now that I am sixty, I see why the idea of elder wisdom has passed from currency. "

" To be President of the United States, sir, is to act as advocate for a blind, venomous, and ungrateful client. "

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

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

" My golf is so delicate, so tenuously wired together with silent inward prayers, exhortations and unstable visualizations, that the sheer pressure of an additional pair of eyes crumbles the whole rickety structure into rubble. "

" The miracle of turning inklings into thoughts and thoughts into words and words into metal and print and ink never palls for me. "

" For many years, I read mystery novels for relaxation. But my tastes were too narrow - and, having read all of Agatha Christie and John Dickson Carr, I discovered that the implausibility and the thinness of the people distracted me unduly from the plot. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" Young or old, a writer sends a book into the world, not himself. "

" In art, anything goes, and if it goes, it goes. "

" The dwelling places of Europe have an air of inheritance, or cumulative possession - a hive occupied by generations of bees. "

" I don't write about too many male businessmen, and I'm not apt to write about too many female businessmen. "

" 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. "

" There's something very reassuring... about the written record. "

" 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. "

" I find in my own writing that only fiction - and rarely, a poem - fully tests me to the kind of limits of what I know and what I feel. "

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

" My last vivid boyhood fright from books came when I was 15; I was visiting my uncle and aunt in Greenwich, and, emboldened by my success with 'The Waste Land,' I opened their copy of 'Ulysses.' The whiff of death off those remorseless, closely written pages overpowered me. So: back to soluble mysteries, and jokes that were not cosmic. "

" Government is either organized benevolence or organized madness; its peculiar magnitude permits no shading. "

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" A person believes various things at various times, even on the same day. "