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.
Some stories or passages are more difficult and demand more fussing with than others, but, in general, I’m a two-draft writer rather than a six-draft writer, or whatever.
The Internet doesn’t like you to learn too much about explosives.
I see no intrinsic reason why a doubly talented artist might not arise and create a comic-strip novel masterpiece.
Without books, we might just melt into the airwaves and be just another set of blips.
In a city like New York, you’re aware of the rich and poor.
For some of us, books are intrinsic to our sense of personal identity.
Sex is like money; only too much is enough.
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.
Writing makes you more human.
To be President of the United States, sir, is to act as advocate for a blind, venomous, and ungrateful client.
By the mid-17th century, telescopes had improved enough to make visible the seasonally growing and shrinking polar ice caps on Mars, and features such as Syrtis Major, a dark patch thought to be a shallow sea.
I was trying to support a family with writing. I didn’t have a private income. I had no other profession.
Humor is my default mode.
In my first 15 or 20 years of authorship, I was almost never asked to give a speech or an interview. The written work was supposed to speak for itself, and to sell itself, sometimes even without the author’s photograph on the back flap.
Old age treats freelance writers pretty gently.
Eros is everywhere. It is what binds.
The rich – they just live in another realm, really.
The firmest house in my fiction, probably, is the little thick-walled sandstone farmhouse of ‘The Centaur’ and ‘Of the Farm’; I had lived in that house, and can visualize every floorboard and bit of worn molding.
All cartoonists are geniuses, but Arnold Roth is especially so.
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.
The substance of fictional architecture is not bricks and mortar but evanescent consciousness.
I would write ads for deodorants or labels for catsup bottles if I had to.
There’s a crystallization that goes on in a poem which the young man can bring off, but which the middle-aged man can’t.
There should always be something gratuitous about art, just as there seems to be, according to the new-wave cosmologists, something gratuitous about the universe.
In tennis, there is the forehand, the backhand, the overhead smash and the drop volley, all with a different grip.
The lust to meet authors ranks low, I think, on the roll of holy appetites; but it is an authentic pang.
A seventeenth-century house can be recognized by its steep roof, massive central chimney and utter porchlessness. Some of those houses have a second-story overhang, emphasizing their medieval look.
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.
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