it’s a rare day when she speaks in anything but platitudes–all those exhausted phrases and hand-me-down ideas that cram the dump sites of contemporary wisdom

I couldn’t imagine myself doing it anymore. It was part of my life that had ended for me, and here was my chance to set out on a fresh course

You can’t put your feet on the ground until you’ve touched the sky.

I’m not a man deeply interested in technology. It eludes me.

And I am nothing if not a stupid, stupid man.

failure” had suddenly lost their meaning for him. The true purpose of art was not to create beautiful objects, he discovered. It was a method of understanding, a way of penetrating the world and finding...

If you’re not ready for everything, you’re not ready for anything.

We grow older, but we do not change. We become more sophisticated, but at bottom we continue to resemble our young selves, eager to listen to the next story and the next, and the next.

Baseball is a universe as large as life itself, and therefore all things in life, whether good or bad, whether tragic or comic, fall within its domain.

The world is governed by chance. Randomness stalks us every day of our lives.

Quinn froze. There was nothing he could do now that would not be a mistake. Whatever choice he made–and he had to make a choice–would be arbitrary, a submission to chance. Uncertainty would haunt him...

When you’re young, you keep reading new writers and you keep changing your mind about how you ought to sound.

You see, the interesting thing about books, as opposed, say, to films, is that it’s always just one person encountering the book, it’s not an audience, it’s one to one.

I don’t think of myself as a metafictional writer at all. I think of myself as a classic writer, a realist writer, who tends to have flights of fancy at times, but nevertheless, my feet...

nadie hace nada en esta vida sin alguien que crea en él

Dünya sarhoş ediyor insanı evlat. Dünyanın bilinmezliği sarhoş ediyor.

I know you don’t love me but that doesn’t mean I’m the wrong girl for you.

I guess I wanted to leave America for awhile. It wasn’t that I wanted to become an expatriate, or just never come back, I needed some breathing room. I’d already been translating French poetry, I’d...

I’ve learned not to look at reviews. Early on, I did. I was always curious.

No es que escribir me produzca un gran placer, pero es mucho peor si no lo hago.

A lot of film people are like that– especially the ones below the line, the blue-collar guys, the grunts. They like putting their hands on the equipment and getting it to do things for them....

Everything can change at any moment, suddenly and forever.

What used to keep me up at night was the fact that I didn’t know how I was going to pay the rent. Now that I can pay the rent, I’m worrying about people I...

History is present in all my novels. And whether I am directly talking about the sociological moment or just immersing my character in the environment, I am very aware of it.

In the end, the art of hunger can be described as an existential art. It is a way of looking death in the face, and by death I mean death as we live it today:...

The grinding search for money can crush the spirit out of you unless you’re made of steel.

Writing has always had that tactile quality for me. It’s a physical experience.

Don’t be a writer; it’s a terrible way to live your life. There’s nothing to be gained from it but poverty and obscurity and solitude. So if you have a taste for all those things,...

I don’t think that you can be prescriptive about anything, I mean, life is too complicated. Maybe there are novels where the author has not in the least thought about it in terms of film,...

una vida rota por el exceso y la escasez de este mundo

Our lives carry us along in ways we cannot control, and almost nothing stays with us. It dies when we do, and death is something that happens to us every day.

We all want to believe in impossible things, I suppose, to persuade ourselves that miracles can happen.

If I could write directly on a typewriter or a computer, I would do it. But keyboards have always intimidated me. I’ve never been able to think clearly with my fingers in that position. A...

People who don’t like my work say that the connections seem too arbitrary. But that’s how life is.

I took a job with the U.S. Census Bureau. In The Locked Room, the third volume of the New York Trilogy, there’s a sequence where the narrator talks about working for the census, and I...

Reading was my escape and my comfort, my consolation, my stimulant of choice: reading for the pure pleasure of it, for the beautiful stillness that surrounds you when you hear an author’s words reverberating in...

All I wanted to do was write – at the time, poems, and prose, too. I guess my ambition was simply to make money however I could to keep myself going in some modest way,...

When I write, the story is always uppermost in my mind, and I feel that everything must be sacrificed to it. All elegant passages, all the curious details, all the so-called beautiful writing – if...

I was always interested in French poetry sort of as a sideline to my own work, I was translating contemporary French poets. That kind of spilled out into translation as a way to earn money,...

That’s how it is with want. As long as you lack something you yearn for it without cease. if only I could have that one thing, you tell yourself, all my problems would be solved....

It was. It will never be again. Remember.

All through my writing life, I’ve had this impulse to write autobiographical works.

Each book I’ve done somehow finds its own unique form, a specific way it has to be written, and once I find it, I stick with it.

I knew from the age of 16 that I wanted to be a writer because I just didn’t think I could do anything else. So I read and read and wrote short stories and dreamed...

La vida nos arrastra de muchas maneras que no podemos controlar y casi nada permanece con nosotros.

And that’s why books are never going to die. It’s impossible. It’s the only time we really go into the mind of a stranger, and we find our common humanity doing this. So the book...

The world is so unpredictable. Things happen suddenly, unexpectedly. We want to feel we are in control of our own existence. In some ways we are, in some ways we’re not. We are ruled by...

People look at the same passage, and one person will say this is the best thing he’s ever read, and another person will say it’s absolutely idiotic. I mean, there’s no way to reconcile those...

Some things get written more quickly than others, but I can’t really measure degrees of difficulty.

I don’t judge these things by numbers. How many people read ‘Paradise Lost’ when it was published? Two hundred? Three? As long as there’s one reader, the book is doing what a book does. Books...