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" When I went away to college, I marveled at the wealth of bookstores around Harvard Square. "

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" Writers may be disreputable, incorrigible, early to decay or late to bloom but they dare to go it alone. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" I've always tried to write about America. It's very worth a writer's effort. "

" In art, anything goes, and if it goes, it goes. "

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

" 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. "

" I must say, when I reread myself, it's the poetry I tend to look at. It's the most exciting to write, and it's over the quickest. "

" A seventeenth-century house can be recognized by its steep roof, massive central chimney and utter porchlessness. Some of those houses have a second-story overhang, emphasizing their medieval look. "

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

" I love Shillington not as one loves Capri or New York, because they are special, but as one loves one's own body and consciousness, because they are synonymous with being. "

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

" Toni Morrison has a habit, perhaps traceable to the pernicious influence of William Faulkner, of plunging into the narrative before the reader has a clue to what is going on. "

" The essential self is innocent, and when it tastes its own innocence knows that it lives for ever. "

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

" I think my first story sold for $550. This was in 1954, and it seemed like quite a lot of money, and I said to myself, 'Hey, I'm a professional writer now.' "

" I'm a dull person. "

" Rain is grace; rain is the sky descending to the earth; without rain, there would be no life. "

" In a city like New York, you're aware of the rich and poor. "

" 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. "

" Thinking it over, I can't locate another artist in the Updike family. "

" Existence itself does not feel horrible; it feels like an ecstasy, rather, which we have only to be still to experience. "

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

" I'm trying to get the terrorist out of the bugaboo category and into the category of a fellow human being. "

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

" A seventeenth-century house tends to be short on frills like hallways and closets; you must improvise. "

" 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. "

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

" 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. "