Nothing keeps its promise.

Each book starts from ashes.

Let's hope the first comes first.

There are no uncontaminated angels

When he is sick, every man wants his mother.

It's amazing how much punishment we can take.

Old age isn't a battle; old age is a massacre.

The horror of being caged has lost its thrill.

The book really comes to life in the rewriting.

It's best to give while your hand is still warm.

The road to hell is paved with works-in-progress.

Satire is moral outrage transformed into comic art.

The signore...wishes her to begin at the beginning.

One either imposes one's ideas or one is imposed on.

History... is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake.

Life is just a short period of time in which you are alive.

Nothing bad can happen to a writer. Everything is material.

Doctor doctor, what do you say, lets put the id back in yid

Should you protect profits? Yes. But run for the hills? No.

Stop worrying about growing old. And think about growing up.

Novel-writing is, for the novelist, a game of let's pretend.

The ordeal is part of the commitment" Esquire Interview 10/10

How easy life is when it's easy, and how hard when it's hard.

How Far back must we go to discover the beginning of trouble?

Oh, to be a center fielder, a center fielder- and nothing more

There's something every woman wants, and that's a man to blame.

As for the kind of writer I am? I am who I don't pretend to be.

Sheer Playfulness and Deadly Seriousness are my closest friends.

I don't ask writers about their work habits. I really don't care.

People are unjust to anger - it can be enlivening and a lot of fun.

When you publish a book, it's the world's book. The world edits it.

Like all enjoyable things, you see, it has unenjoyable parts to it.

When the whole world doesn't believe in God, it'll be a great place.

Unless one is inordinately fond of subordination, one is always at war.

I was a biography in constant motion, memory to the marrow of my bones.

A Jewish man with his parents alive is half the time a helpless infant!

I am the Raskolnikov of jerking off – the sticky evidence is everywhere!

Being in the dark from sentence to sentence is what convinces me to go on.

The best readers come to fiction to be free of ... all that isn't fiction.

For discipline is imposed not just on oneself but on those in one's orbit.

Don't judge it. Just write it. Don't judge it. It's not for you to judge it.

The tragedy of the man not set up for tragedy ? that is every man?s tragedy.

If you read a novel in more than two weeks, you don't read the novel really.

He had learned the worst lesson that life can teach - that it makes no sense.

You cannot observe people through an ideology. Your ideology observes for you.

It’s amazing what lies people can sustain behind the mask of their real faces.

If I don't measure up as an American writer, at least leave me to my delusion.

A writer has to be driven crazy to help him to see. A writer needs his poisons.

I don't wish to be a slave any longer to the stringent exigencies of literature.

You put too much stock in human intelligence, it doesn't annihilate human nature.

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