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" To have the regard of one's peers is immensely moving. "

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" I can walk into a bookstore and hand over my credit card and they don't know who the hell I am. Maybe that says something about bookstore clerks. "

" There are two books that impressed me when I was very young. One was 'The Adventures of Augie March' - the idea of having something so generous, and so adventurous and improvisatory. The other was 'The U.S.A. Trilogy,' by John Dos Passos. "

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

" 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. "

" If we ever find out how the brain works, with all its complexity, then we will be able to build a machine that has consciousness. And if that happens, that is a road to planetary disaster because everything we've thought about ourselves, since the Bronze Age, the Bible, all of that will be gone. "

" 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. "

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

" Good writing is supposed to evoke sensation in the reader - not the fact that it is raining, but the feeling of being rained upon. "

" I have a number of vices, one of which is moderation. "

" 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. "

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

" It seems to me that in literature, books have always been answers to other books. "

" I try to avoid experience if I can. Most experience is bad. "

" I don't think anything I've written has been done in under six or eight drafts. Usually it takes me a few years to write a book. 'World's Fair' was an exception. It seemed to be a particularly fluent book as it came. I did it in seven months. I think what happened in that case is that God gave me a bonus book. "

" It's like driving a car at night. You never see further than your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way. "

" 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. "

" Planning to write is not writing. Outlining, researching, talking to people about what you're doing, none of that is writing. Writing is writing. "

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

" I discovered Einstein said the same thing about his celebrated theories of relativity that writers say about their work when he said he didn't have any feelings of personal possession of these ideas. Once they were out there, they came from somewhere else. And that's exactly the feeling when you write. You don't feel possessive about it. "

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

" A new reader shouldn't be able to find you in your work, though someone who's read more may begin to. "

" When you're writing a book, you don't really think about it critically. You don't want to know too well what you're doing. First, you write the book, then you find the justification for it. "

" 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. "

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

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

" The important thing is not to be too comfortable when you're writing. Noise in the street? That's good. The computer goes down? That's good. All these things are good. It has to be a little bit of a struggle. "

" The nature of good fiction is that it dwells in ambiguity. "