Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
Movies are too literal.
Planning to write is not writing.
Dad is always hiding in his book.
I've outlasted many marriages at Random House.
A book begins as a private excitement of the mind.
I worry about images. Images are what things mean.
The act of composition is a series of discoveries.
I thought I would lose, so I didn't prepare a speech.
I have a number of vices, one of which is moderation.
The images of things are not the things in themselves.
To have the regard of one's peers is immensely moving.
Writing is a socially acceptable form of schizophrenia.
A novelist is a person who lives in other people's skins.
Stories distribute the suffering so that it can be borne.
Communists have no respect for people, only for positions.
The nature of good fiction is that it dwells in ambiguity.
I try to avoid experience if I can. Most experience is bad.
Writing is immensely difficult. The short forms especially.
In fiction, you know, there are no borders. You can go anywhere.
I have been everywhere because I don't know what I'm looking for.
There is music in words, and it can be heard you know, by thinking.
Writing is an exploration. You start from nothing and learn as you go.
We are able to walk on air, but only as long as our illusion supports us.
Facts are the images of history, just as images are the facts of fiction.
If you feel a bump on page one hundred, it may be you went off on page fifty.
Anyone at any age is able to tell the story of his or her life with authority.
The music of the Stones pounds the air like the amplified pulse of my erection.
When you're working well, you don't do research. Whatever you need comes to you.
A novel is a printed circuit through which flows the force of a reader's own life.
I thought of myself as a writer for years before I got around to writing anything.
There is no longer any such thing as fiction or nonfiction; there's only narrative.
We make a mistake to condescend to the past as if it were preparatory to our own time.
Someone dying asks if there is life after death. Yes, comes the answer, only not yours.
The historian will tell you what happened. The novelist will tell you what it felt like.
Longing, the hope for fulfillment, is the one unwavering passion of the world's commerce.
My sense of what a book should be has changed so radically. I like to think for the better.
Like art and politics, gangsterism is a very important avenue of assimilation into society.
People come out of the mid-west and go to the Ivy League. I kind of reversed the direction.
Most people are quiet in the world, and live in it tentatively, as if it were not their own.
Books are acts of composition: you compose them. You make music: the music is called fiction.
Time seems to me a drift, a shifting of sand. And my mind is shifting with it. I am wearing away.
I am telling you what I know—words have music and if you are a musician you will write to hear them.
I have committed many sins in my life. This precise sin-the sin against poets-is without absolution.
A new reader shouldn't be able to find you in your work, though someone who's read more may begin to.
We're always attracted to the edges of what we are, out by the edges where it's a little raw and nervy.
Children have a lot more to worry about from the parents who raised them than from the books they read.
Every major work of art is a transgression, but the artist is not necessarily, by nature, a transgressor.
Poems have ideas. The ideas of poems come out of their emotions and their emotions are carried on images.
A writer of books has to admit that film is the enemy, and that in my case I have been sleeping with the enemy.
The three most important documents a free society gives are a birth certificate, a passport, and a library card.