Mendel had a remarkable nature as a boy. I’m not talking about miracles. Miracles are a burden for a tzaddik, not the proof of one. Miracles prove nothing except to those whose faith is bought...

Bina, thank you. Bina, listen, this guy. His name wasn’t Lasker. This guy-‘She puts a hand to his mouth. She has not touched him in three years. It probably would be too much to say...

I completely lost interest in comics. I sold my collection. I didn’t go back to them for fifteen years – until after Wonder Boys.

This song always kills me, I said. She sighed, and then gave up. Why? Oh, I don’t know. It makes me feel nostalgia for a time I never even knew. I wasn’t even alive. That’s...

All literature, highbrow or low, from the Aeneid onward, is fan fiction….Through parody and pastiche, allusion and homage, retelling and reimagining the stories that were told before us and that we have come of age...

It drains the bars and cafes after hours, concentrates the wicked and the guilty along its chipped Formica counter, and thrums with the gossip of criminals, policemen, shtarkers,and schlemiels, whores and night owls … three...

It is unusual for Joe to be that way, but that’s what interested me.

We are accustomed to repeating the cliché, and to believing, that ‘our most precious resource is our children.’ But we have plenty of children to go around, God knows, and as with Doritos, we can...

I don’t think anything else can be hopeful or accomplished if you have the fear that you will get arrested or prosecuted or censored, … I saw a cry for help. So it was my...

The ‘Talk of the Town’ was really that in the 1940s: it was all about New York, it was only about New York, and it was about people.

The other day as I was stepping out of Star Grocery on Claremont Avenue with some pork ribs under my arm, the Berkeley sky cloudless, a smell of jasmine in the air, a car driving...

For the first time in a very many years, he felt the old vexation, the mingled impatience and pleasure at the world’s beautiful refusal to yield up its mysteries without a fight.

I found one remaining box of comics which I had saved. When I opened it up and that smell came pouring out, that old paper smell, I was struck by a rush of memories, a...

He could not shake the feeling – reportedly common among ghosts – that it was not he but those he haunted whose lives were devoid of matter, sense, future.

He has the memory of a convict, the balls of a fireman, and the eyesight of a housebreaker. When there is crime to fight, Landsman tears around Sitka like a man with his pant leg...

I was afraid that I had made a profound, irrevocable mistake, and that, as in a fantastic tale, if I did not find something firm and magical to grab a hold of right that moment...

It was an incredible resource. I’d sit with a big stack of bound New Yorkers in the library and read through, especially the ‘Talk of the Town’ sections.

Every future we imagine is transformed inexorably into a part of our children’s understanding of their past, of the assumptions their parents and grandparents could not help but make.The Killer Hook

It just made sense to apply this on a grander scale. If one of us can raise that much for a nonprofit on his own, what could a dozen or more authors pull in for...

The things I keep going back to, rereading, maybe they say more about me as a reader than about the books. Love in the Time of Cholera, Pale Fire.

And the next moment the fierce wind comes screaming, whirling the needle-pointed dust, stifling all hope. And you know then that what has not happened will never happen. That hope is an end within itself.

As he watched Joe stand, blazing, on the fire escape, Sammy felt an ache in his chest that turned out to be, as so often occurs when memory and desire conjoin with a transient effect...

I have a deadline. I’m glad. I think that will help me get it done.

[His coat] emitted an odor of bus station so desolate that just standing next to him you could feel your luck changing for the worse.

Airplane Dream #13′ told the story, more or less, of a dream Rosa had had about the end of the world. There were no human beings left but her, and she had found herself flying...

He looked so profoundly disappointed in me that I wondered for a moment if he was someone I knew.

It was fun. That was something I came to fairly late.

decorate” it; she infused it.

To some of them it had just been work, … But some got caught up in the romance of creating comic books.

What’s going to be hard for me is to try to divorce myself as much as possible from what I wrote. I’ll have to approach it simply as raw material and try to craft a...

The problem, if anything, was precisely the opposite. I had too much to write: too many fine and miserable buildings to construct and streets to name and clock towers to set chiming, too many characters...

There are no moments more painful for a parent than those in which you contemplate your child’s perfect innocence of some imminent pain, misfortune, or sorrow. That innocence (like every kind of innocence children have)...

I like giving readers an opportunity to get a hold of me in that way and to read things I’ve written which might disappear otherwise.

Miracles prove nothing except to those whose faith is bought very cheap, sir.

People with Books. What, in 2007, could be more incongruous than that? It makes me want to laugh.”[Afterword]

As long as she was falling in love with me, I might as well start making her promises I didn’t intend to keep.

It’s good to have it over with. I worked on it a long time, and I didn’t know what people were going to think of it. Would people like it? Would they buy it? So...

All of the dissatisfactions he had felt in his practice of the art form he had stumbled across within a week of his arrival in America, the cheap conventions, the low expectations among publishers, readers,...

Did I really win? … I had kind of figured it was not my year. My goodness, this is exciting.

It was the kind of promise a father makes easily and sincerely, knowing at the same time that it will be impossible to keep. The truth of some promises is not as important as whether...

All novels are sequels; influence is bliss.

[My dad] didn’t do much apart from the traditional winning of bread. He didn’t take me to get my hair cut or my teeth cleaned; he didn’t make the appointments. He didn’t shop for my...

I love Richard Yates, his work, and the novel, Revolutionary Road. It’s a devastating novel.

He was through with this conversation. As a rule, they tended to avoid questions like “How sane are we?” and “Do our lives have meaning?” The need for avoidance was acute and apparent to both...

[A]dventures befall the unadventurous as readily, if not as frequently, as the bold. Adventures are a logical and reliable result – and have been since at least the time of Odysseus – of the fatal...

A few other couples joined us on the dance floor and we lost ourselves among them. I’d never been able to figure out exactly what was involved in slow dancing, so I contented myself, as...

Joe is the hero and Sammy is the sidekick. That’s how I feel about it.

The magician seemed to promise that something torn to bits might be mended without a seam, that what had vanished might reappear, that a scattered handful of doves or dust might be reunited by a...

The First Amendment has the same role in my life as a citizen and a writer as the sun has in our ecosystem,

The first and last duty of the lover of the game of baseball,” Peavine’s book began, “whether in the stands or on the field, is the same as that of the lover of life itself:...