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" Writing makes you more human. "

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" Mars has long exerted a pull on the human imagination. The erratically moving red star in the sky was seen as sinister or violent by the ancients: The Greeks identified it with Ares, the god of war; the Babylonians named it after Nergal, god of the underworld. To the ancient Chinese, it was Ying-huo, the fire planet. "

" New York is a city with virtually no habitable public space - only private spaces expensively maintained within the general disaster. "

" 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. "

" Young or old, a writer sends a book into the world, not himself. "

" 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. "

" Professionalism in art has this difficulty: To be professional is to be dependable, to be dependable is to be predictable, and predictability is esthetically boring - an anti-virtue in a field where we hope to be astonished and startled and at some deep level refreshed. "

" Belief, like love, must be voluntary. "

" Somehow, it is hard to dislike a man once you have played a round of golf with him. "

" Publishers are looking for blockbusters - all the world loves a megaseller. "

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

" It's so hard to make a good tee shot after a birdie. "

" 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. "

" I was raised in the Depression, when there was a great sense of dog-eat-dog and people fighting over scraps. "

" An affair wants to spill, to share its glory with the world. No act is so private it does not seek applause. "

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

" Tiger Woods did not always win majors with ease; after his narrow victory in the 1999 PGA, he slumped and sighed as if he'd been carrying rocks uphill all afternoon. "

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" As movers and the moved both know, books are heavy freight, the weight of refrigerators and sofas broken up into cardboard boxes. They make us think twice about changing addresses. "

" But for a few phrases from his letters and an odd line or two of his verse, the poet walks gagged through his own biography. "

" Old age treats freelance writers pretty gently. "

" My complaint, as an exile who once loved New York and who likes to return a half-dozen times a year, is not that it plays host to extremes of the human condition: There is grandeur in that, and necessity. "

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

" For some of us, books are intrinsic to our sense of personal identity. "

" Nature refuses to rest. "

" Gods don't answer letters. "

" American art in general... takes to surreal exaggerations and metaphors; but its Puritan work ethic has little use for the playful self-indulgence behind Parisian Surrealism. "

" A lot of the Koran does not speak very eloquently to a Westerner. Much of it is either legalistic or opaquely poetic. "

" Smaller than a breadbox, bigger than a TV remote, the average book fits into the human hand with a seductive nestling, a kiss of texture, whether of cover cloth, glazed jacket, or flexible paperback. "

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

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