After a certain number of years, our faces become our biographies.

Traveling is seeing; it is the implicit that we travel by.

If the soul is the mind at its purest, best, clearest, busiest, profoundest, … then Bellow’s charge has been to restore the soul to American literature.

People who mistake facts for ideas are incomplete thinkers; they are gossips

I’m not afraid of facts, I welcome facts but a congeries of facts is not equivalent to an idea. This is the essential fallacy of the so-called ”scientific” mind. People who mistake facts for ideas...

I think at this moment, in the absence of Bellow, that Roth is the most courageous American writer. There’s nothing he’s afraid to say.

If a novel’s salient aim is virtue, I want to throw it against the wall.

When something does not insist on being noticed, when we aren’t grabbed by the collar or struck on the skull by a presence or an event, we take for granted the very things that most...

The usefulness of madmen is famous: they demonstrate society’s logic flagrantly carried out down to its last scrimshaw scrap.

An author’s extraliterary utterance (blunt information), prenovel or postnovel, may infiltrate journalism; it cannot touch the novel itself. Fiction does not invent out of a vacuum, but it invents; and what it invents is, first,...

[The prolific generosity of Dylan’s talent down the years has been a wonder to behold.] Industry… is itself the artist’s portion, … There is no question that quantity – added, of course, to genius –...

The engineering is secondary to the vision.

Get thee to the novel! – the novel, that word-woven submarine, piloted by intimation and intuition, that will dive you to the deeps of the heart’s maelstrom.

Heir to the Glimmering World

We carry it with us and it goes in and out.

What does the novel know? It has no practical or educational aim; yet it knows what ordinary knowledge cannot seize. The novel’s intricate tangle of character-and-incident alights on the senses with a hundred cobwebby knowings...

I find that writing comes from the three fingers. The thumb, the index and middle fingers. It flows out of the pen. Real writing comes out of your hand, for me, anyway,

Who owns Anne Frank?

Lie, illusion, deception, she said–was that it truly, the universal language we all speak?

Travelers are fantasists, conjurers, seers – and what they finally discover is that every round object everywhere is a crystal ball: stone, teapot, the marvelous globe of the human eye.

I wanted to use what I was, to be what I was born to be – not to have a ‘career,” but to be that straightforward obvious unmistakable animal, a writer.

A writer is dreamed and transfigured into being by spells, wishes, goldfish, silhouettes of trees, boxes of fairy tales dropped in the mud, uncles’ and cousins’ books, tablets and capsules and powders…and then one day...

Nothing is so awesomely unfamiliar as the familiar that discloses itself at the end of a journey

One reason writers write is out of revenge. Life hurts; certain ideas and experiences hurt; one wants to clarify, to set out illuminations, to replay the old bad scenes and get the Treppenworte said —...

It seemed to Rosa Lublin that the whole peninsula of Florida was weighted down with regret. Everyone had left behind a real life. Here they had nothing. They were all scarecrows, blown about under the...

To imagine the unimaginable is the highest use of the imagination

Wondrous hole! Magical hole! Dazzlingly influential hole! Noble and effulgent hole! From this hole everything follows logically: first the baby, then the placenta, then, for years and years and years until death, a way of...

We often take for granted the very things that most deserve our gratitude.

In saying what is obvious, never choose cunning, yelling works better

The Messiah of Stockholm.” It takes place in Stockholm. I’d better say no more, or the Muse will wipe it out.