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" The inner spaces that a good story lets us enter are the old apartments of religion. "

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

" In tennis, there is the forehand, the backhand, the overhead smash and the drop volley, all with a different grip. "

" I like short stories. "

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

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

" A seventeenth-century house tends to be short on frills like hallways and closets; you must improvise. "

" Celebrity is a mask that eats into the face. "

" I was raised in the Depression, when there was a great sense of dog-eat-dog and people fighting over scraps. "

" By the mid-17th century, telescopes had improved enough to make visible the seasonally growing and shrinking polar ice caps on Mars, and features such as Syrtis Major, a dark patch thought to be a shallow sea. "

" Fiction is burdened for me with a sense of duty. "

" Each morning my characters greet me with misty faces willing, though chilled, to muster for another day's progress through the dazzling quicksand the marsh of blank paper. "

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

" I have never liked haircuts. "

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

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

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

" Most of American life consists of driving somewhere and then returning home, wondering why the hell you went. "

" Billy Collins writes lovely poems. Limpid, gently and consistently startling, more serious than they seem, they describe all the worlds that are and were and some others besides. "

" If the worst comes true, and the paper book joins the papyrus scroll and parchment codex in extinction, we will miss, I predict, a number of things about it. "

" In any interview, you do say more or less than you mean. "

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

" Until the 20th century it was generally assumed that a writer had said what he had to say in his works. "

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

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "