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

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" The miracle of turning inklings into thoughts and thoughts into words and words into metal and print and ink never palls for me. "

" Baseball skills schizophrenically encompass a pitcher's, a batter's and a fielder's. "

" My golf is so delicate, so tenuously wired together with silent inward prayers, exhortations and unstable visualizations, that the sheer pressure of an additional pair of eyes crumbles the whole rickety structure into rubble. "

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

" The good ending dismisses us with a touch of ceremony and throws a backward light of significance over the story just read. It makes it, as they say, or unmakes it. A weak beginning is forgettable, but the end of a story bulks in the reader's mind like the giant foot in a foreshortened photograph. "

" 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. "

" To be a human being is to be in a state of tension between your appetites and your dreams, and the social realities around you and your obligations to your fellow man. "

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

" 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. "

" To guarantee the individual maximum freedom within a social frame of minimal laws ensures - if not happiness - its hopeful pursuit. "

" Does fiction, artistic writing, have much of a future? I must say it's on the way out. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" I don't write about too many male businessmen, and I'm not apt to write about too many female businessmen. "

" I was an only child. I needed an alternative to family life - to real life, you could almost say - and cartoons, pictures in a book, the animated movies, seemed to provide it. "

" America is a vast conspiracy to make you happy. "

" I don't know; I think I'd be gloomy without some faith that there is a purpose and there is a kind of witness to my life. "

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

" I like short stories. "

" If men do not keep on speaking terms with children, they cease to be men, and become merely machines for eating and for earning money. "

" The study of literature threatens to become a kind of paleontology of failure, and criticism a supercilious psychoanalysis of authors. "

" 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. "

" Some stories or passages are more difficult and demand more fussing with than others, but, in general, I'm a two-draft writer rather than a six-draft writer, or whatever. "

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

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

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

" In becoming an icon, it is useful to die young. "

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

" 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.' "

" 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. "