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" What interests me is why men think of women as witches. It's because they're so fascinating and exasperating, so other. "

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

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

" The writer must face the fact that ordinary lives are what most people live most of the time, and that the novel as a narration of the fantastic and the adventurous is really an escapist plot; that aesthetically, the ordinary, the banal, is what you must deal with. "

" 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. "

" Religion enables us to ignore nothingness and get on with the jobs of life. "

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

" The first author I met socially was Joyce Cary. "

" My first ambition was to be an animator for Walt Disney. Then I wanted to be a magazine cartoonist. "

" 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. "

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

" The essential support and encouragement comes from within, arising out of the mad notion that your society needs to know what only you can tell it. "

" 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. "

" I like short stories. "

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

" 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. "

" Belief, like love, must be voluntary. "

" The refusal to rest content, the willingness to risk excess on behalf of one's obsessions, is what distinguishes artists from entertainers, and what makes some artists adventurers on behalf of us all. "

" 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. "

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

" 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.' "

" 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. "

" Books externalise our brains and turn our homes into thinking bodies. "

" 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. "

" The Internet doesn't like you to learn too much about explosives. "

" Being naked approaches being revolutionary; going barefoot is mere populism. "

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

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

" I seem to have this need to belong to some church. I get worried on Sunday mornings. "

" Most Americans haven't had my happy experience of living for thirteen years in a seventeenth-century house, since most of America lacks seventeenth-century houses. "

" Art is like baby shoes. When you coat them with gold, they can no longer be worn. "