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" 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. "

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" A house, having been willfully purchased and furnished, tells us more than a body, and its description is a foremost resource of the art of fiction. "

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

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

" There is a great deal of busywork to a writer's life, as to a professor's life, a great deal of work that matters only in that, if you don't do it, your desk becomes very full of papers. So, there is a lot of letter answering and a certain amount of speaking, though I try to keep that at a minimum. "

" 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 feel old only when I look at my hands or at myself in the mirror. "

" Old age treats freelance writers pretty gently. "

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

" I still want to give my public, such as it is, a book a year. "

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

" I find in my own writing that only fiction - and rarely, a poem - fully tests me to the kind of limits of what I know and what I feel. "

" My generation was maybe the last in which you could set up shop as a writer and hope to make a living at it. "

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

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

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

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

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

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

" Every marriage tends to consist of an aristocrat and a peasant. Of a teacher and a learner. "

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

" Memories, impressions and emotions from the first 20 years on earth are most writers' main material; little that comes afterward is quite so rich and resonant. "

" 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. "

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

" Americans have been conditioned to respect newness, whatever it costs them. "

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

" America is beyond power; it acts as in a dream, as a face of God. Wherever America is, there is freedom, and wherever America is not, madness rules with chains, darkness strangles millions. Beneath her patient bombers, paradise is possible. "

" Without books, we might just melt into the airwaves and be just another set of blips. "

" 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.' "