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:...

You need three things to become a successful novelist: talent, luck and discipline. Discipline is the one element of those three things that you can control, and so that is the one that you have...

A father is a man who fails every day.

I wanted to give readers the feeling of knowing the characters, a mental image.

Although sex was something they both regarded as perilous, marriage had, by contrast, seemed safe– a safe house in a world of danger; the ultimate haven of two solitary, fearful souls. When you were single,...

I do think his books would reward reading by people who think they don’t like fantasy.

Louis Pasteur said, ‘Chance favors the prepared mind.’ If you’re really engaged in the writing, you’ll work yourself out of whatever jam you find yourself in.

Every universe, our own included, begins in conversation. Every golem in the history of the world, from Rabbi Hanina’s delectable goat to the river-clay Frankenstein of Rabbi Judah Loew ben Bezalel, was summoned into existence...

As soon as I read that, it clicked: that’s my theater of war. It was exciting to think that I could write about World War Two from a totally new place.

She was a large, boneless woman who draped herself like an old blanket over the chairs of the apartment, staring for hours with her gray eyes at ghosts, figments, recollections, and dust caught in oblique...

Most science fiction seemed to be written for people who already liked science fiction; I wanted to write stories for anyone, anywhere, living at any time in the history of the world.

It takes a sour woman to make a good pickle.

I was a big comics reader when I was a kid, from about six to fifteen. I collected them, I read them, I even created my own characters in comics.

The city was new again, and newly dangerous, and I would walk the streets quickly, eyes averted from those of passersby, like a spy in the employ of lust and happiness, carrying the secret deep...

It was the beginning of youth culture and pandering to youth culture, … In that, the comic book publishers were definitely pioneers.

Moby Dick – that book is so amazing. I just realized that it starts with two characters meeting in bed; that’s how my book begins, too, but I hadn’t noticed the parallel before, two characters...

There’s nothing more embarrassing than to have earned the disfavor of a perceptive animal.

Take care-there is no force more powerful than that of an unbridled imagination.

Comic books were just the means for me to tell the story.

this one-way rocket to Death in Adulthood” “Normal Time” in New California Writing

I HAD known him as a bulldozer, as a samurai, as an android programmed to kill, as Plastic Man and Titanium Man and Matter-Eater Lad, as a Buick Electra, as a Peterbilt truck, and even,...

From his corner office on the ground floor of the St. Cyril station house, Inspector Dick has a fine view of the parking lot. Six Dumpsters plated and hooped like iron maidens against bears. Beyond...

I was surprised that my wife thought it was a good idea, then again with my agent, another woman, then my editor, another woman – in spite of the fact that all three of them...

His body had almost no hair and his naked little circumcised johnson was nearly as pale as the rest of him, white as a boy’s – perhaps over time one’s genitals emerge from the pots...

It’s very difficult to fail at pornography

People keep saying, ‘Oh, you’re getting all these great reviews, that must make you really happy.’ I guess it does, but mostly it’s just a relief.

The whole house seemed to exhale a melancholy breath of emptiness

A mere redrawing of borders, a change in governments, those things can never faze a Jewess with a good supply of hand wipes in her bag.

Every time another review comes out I let out a deep breath.

The winter drove them mad. It drove every man mad who had ever lived through it; there was only ever the question of degree. The sun disappeared, and you could not leave the tunnels, and...

Other than along certain emotional tangents there was little in the book that felt as if it had actually been lived. It was a fiction produced by someone who knew only fictions, The Tempest as...