Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
Writing and rewriting are a constant search for what it is one is saying.
I love my government not least for the extent to which it leaves me alone.
Life is a roller coaster, you have your ups and downs unless you fall off.
Money is like water in a leaky bucket: no sooner there, it begins to drip.
I would write ads for deodorants or labels for catsup bottles if I had to.
There is this quality, in things, of the right way seeming wrong at first.
Publishers are looking for blockbusters - all the world loves a megaseller.
I imagine most of that stuff on the information highway is roadkill anyway.
Americans have been conditioned to respect newness, whatever it costs them.
I've always tried to write about America. It's very worth a writer's effort.
Being naked approaches being revolutionary; going barefoot is mere populism.
I never made a decision in my life that wasn't one hundred per cent selfish.
You can never get the smell of smoke out. Like the smell of failure in life.
Man is a means for turning things into spirit and turning spirit into things.
How can the planet keep turning and turning and not get so bored it explodes?
Of plants tomatoes seemed the most human, eager and fragile and prone to rot.
Sometimes it seems the whole purpose of pets is to bring death into the house.
If she’d been born at the right time they would have burned her over in Salem.
All love is betrayal, in that it flatters life. The loveless man is best armed.
My mother didn't raise me to be a critic, but I seem to have become one anyway.
Atrocity is truly emperor; All things that thrive are slaves of cruel Creation.
Now that I am sixty, I see why the idea of elder wisdom has passed from currency.
Any activity becomes creative when the doer cares about doing it right or better.
There is the fear that you somehow neglected to say what was really yours to say.
Art is like baby shoes. When you coat them with gold, they can no longer be worn.
I would rather be seated between any two women than any two men at a dinner party.
You cannot but learn more of the world's heft, as you take it now into your hands.
Somehow, it is hard to dislike a man once you have played a round of golf with him.
New York is of course many cities, and an exile does not return to the one he left.
Life is a video game. No matter how good you get, you are always zapped in the end.
Figure out where you're going before you go there: he was told that a long time ago.
Baseball skills schizophrenically encompass a pitcher's, a batter's and a fielder's.
Dreams come true; without that possibility, nature would not incite us to have them.
I seem to have this need to belong to some church. I get worried on Sunday mornings.
The inner spaces that a good story lets us enter are the old apartments of religion.
All dancing is now is standing in place and letting the devil of the music enter you.
Laws aren't ghosts in this country, they walk around with the smell of earth on them.
Living is a compromise, between doing what you want and doing what other people want.
As souls must cry when they awaken in tiny babies and find themselves far from heaven
New York is, of course, many cities, and an exile does not return to the one he left.
Without books, we might just melt into the airwaves and be just another set of blips.
Does fiction, artistic writing, have much of a future? I must say it's on the way out.
But it seems to me that once you begin a gesture it's fatal not to go through with it.
The fact that we still live well cannot ease the feeling that we no longer live nobly.
Musicians are very mysterious and wonderful people to me; I don't know how they do it.
My life is, in a sense, trash. My life is only that of which the residue is my writing.
The golf swing is like a suitcase into which we are trying to pack one too many things.
How can you respect the world when you see it's being run by a bunch of kids turned old?
You always find things you didn't know you were going to say, and that is the adventure.
The first breath of adultery is the freest; after it, constraints aping marriage develop.