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

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

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

" 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. "

" I have never liked haircuts. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" Every marriage tends to consist of an aristocrat and a peasant. Of a teacher and a learner. "

" It is in middles that extremes clash, where ambiguity restlessly rules. "

" What art offers is space - a certain breathing room for the spirit. "

" Creativity is merely a plus name for regular activity. Any activity becomes creative when the doer cares about doing it right, or better. "

" Perhaps I have written fiction because everything unambiguously expressed seems somehow crass to me; and when the subject is myself, I want to jeer and weep. "

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

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

" Tiger Woods did not always win majors with ease; after his narrow victory in the 1999 PGA, he slumped and sighed as if he'd been carrying rocks uphill all afternoon. "

" Memory has a spottiness, as if the film was sprinkled with developer instead of immersed in it. "

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

" 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. "

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

" By the time a partnership dissolves, it has dissolved. "

" People are incorrigibly themselves. "

" American art in general... takes to surreal exaggerations and metaphors; but its Puritan work ethic has little use for the playful self-indulgence behind Parisian Surrealism. "

" 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. "

" The cinema has done more for my spiritual life than the church. My ideas of fame, success and beauty all originate from the big screen. Whereas Christian religion is retreating everywhere and losing more and more influence; film has filled the vacuum and supports us with myths and action-controlling images. "

" John Barth, I think, was really a writer of my own age and somewhat of my own temperament, although his books are very different from mine, and he has been a spokesman for the very ambitious, long, rather academic novel. But I don't think that what he is saying, so far as I understand it, is so very different from what I'm saying. "

" 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. "

" There should always be something gratuitous about art, just as there seems to be, according to the new-wave cosmologists, something gratuitous about the universe. "

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

" The writers we tend to universally admire, like Beckett, or Kafka, or TS Eliot, are not very prolific. "

" 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. "

" Golf's ultimate moral instruction directs us to find within ourselves a pivotal center of enjoyment: relax into a rhythm that fits the hills and swales, and play the shot at hand - not the last one, or the next one, but the one at your feet, in the poison ivy, where you put it. "