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" The historian will tell you what happened. The novelist will tell you what it felt like. "

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" 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. "

" 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. "

" I like commas. I detest semi-colons - I don't think they belong in a story. And I gave up quotation marks long ago. I found I didn't need them, they were fly-specks on the page. "

" 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. "

" My books start almost before I realise it. Once in a while, some accident causes an idea to rise to the surface and say: 'now.' "

" I thought I would lose, so I didn't prepare a speech. "

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

" 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. "

" History is the present. That's why every generation writes it anew. But what most people think of as history is its end product, myth. "

" Somewhere along the line the rhythms and tonalities of music elided in my brain with the sounds that words make and the rhythm that sentences have. "

" I've outlasted many marriages at Random House. "

" 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. "

" Movies are too literal. "

" 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. "

" Books are acts of composition: you compose them. You make music: the music is called fiction. "

" 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. "

" Writing is an exploration. You start from nothing and learn as you go. "

" I started on computers with 'Billy Bathgate,' a little orange screen with black letters. I thought it was really cool, but it actually slowed me up for a while because it's so easy to revise, I tended to stay on the same page. I've learned to discipline myself. "

" Like art and politics, gangsterism is a very important avenue of assimilation into society. "

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

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

" Writing is a socially acceptable form of schizophrenia. "

" 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. "

" I began to ask two questions while I was reading a book that excited me: not only what was going to happen next, but how is this done? How is it that these words on the page make me feel the way I'm feeling? This is the line of inquiry that I think happens in a child's mind, without him even knowing he has aspirations as a writer. "

" 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. "

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

" We're always attracted to the edges of what we are, out by the edges where it's a little raw and nervy. "