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" There is no pleasing New Englanders, my dear, their soil is all rocks and their hearts are bloodless absolutes. "

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" Gods don't answer letters. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

" Four years was enough of Harvard. I still had a lot to learn, but had been given the liberating notion that now I could teach myself. "

" Dreams come true; without that possibility, nature would not incite us to have them. "

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

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

" 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. "

" It's so hard to make a good tee shot after a birdie. "

" An affair wants to spill, to share its glory with the world. No act is so private it does not seek applause. "

" My transition from wanting to be a cartoonist to wanting to be a writer may have come about through that friendly opposition, that even-handed pairing, of pictures and words. "

" Authors should be honored only for their works. "

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

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

" A room containing Philip Roth, I have noticed, begins hilariously to whirl and pulse with a mix of rebelliousness and constriction that I take to be Oedipal. "

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

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

" The Founding Fathers in their wisdom decided that children were an unnatural strain on parents. So they provided jails called schools, equipped with tortures called an education. "

" 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. "

" All love comes from the family. "

" If my mother hadn't been trying to be a writer, I don't know if I would have thought of it myself. "

" I don't think women are dumb. "

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

" The substance of fictional architecture is not bricks and mortar but evanescent consciousness. "

" 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. "

" I should mention something that nobody ever thinks about, but proofreading takes a lot of time. After you write something, there are these proofs that keep coming, and there's this panicky feeling that 'This is me and I must make it better.' "

" 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. "

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

" We're past the age of heroes and hero kings... Most of our lives are basically mundane and dull, and it's up to the writer to find ways to make them interesting. "