I’ve been trying to fit everything in, trying to get to the end before it’s too late, but I see now how badly I’ve deceived myself. Words do not allow such things. The closer you...

We are continually shaped by the forces of coincidence.

When you pick up a book, everyone knows it’s imaginary. You don’t have to pretend it’s not a book. We don’t have to pretend that people don’t write books. That omniscient third-person narration isn’t the...

I write the paragraph, then I’m crossing out, changing words, trying to improve it. When it seems more or less OK, then I type it up because sometimes it’s almost illegible, and if I wait,...

It’s no accident that he should’ve felt that way because I very consciously was writing a book about the 20th century. In fact, all during the writing of the book I had a subtitle in...

… I chanced upon these words from a letter by Van Gogh: “Like everyone else, I feel the need of family and friendship, affection and friendly intercourse. I am not made of iron, like a...

Chance is an element of life. What I try to do is study what I call the mechanics of reality as carefully as I can.

The kind of fiction I’m trying to write is about telling the truth.

How is it possible for someone who believes that the world was created in six days to have a rational conversation with me, who doesn’t believe that, about other possibilities?

For several years Quinn had been having the same conversations with this man, whose name he did not know. Once, when he had been in the luncheonette, they had talked about baseball, and now, each...

I felt the taste of mortality in my mouth, and at that moment I understood that I was not going to live forever. It takes a long time to learn that, but when you finally...

My French was neither good nor bad. I had enough to understand what people said to me, but speaking was difficult, and there were times when no words came to my lips, when I struggled...

I really have no interest in myself.

I think I hate cynicism more than anything else. It’s the curse of our age, and I want to avoid it at all costs.

In my studio, it is unkempt and unattractive. Once I’m in my work, I don’t notice where I am.

Good begets good; evil begets evil; and even if the good you give is met by evil, you have no choice but to go on giving better than you get. Otherwise-and these were Willy’s exact...

The moon people do not eat by swallowing food but by smelling it. Their money is poetry – actual poems, written out on pieces of paper whose value is determined by the worth of the...

What keeps me up at night? Anxiety. Anxiety, the inability to go to sleep, it’s quite literally that.

With a computer, you make your changes on the screen and then you print out a clean copy. With a typewriter, you can’t get a clean manuscript unless you start again from scratch. It’s an...

Films and television and even comic books are churning out vast quantities of fictional narratives, and the public continues to swallow them up with great passion. That is because human beings need stories.

Blue in the Face’ is a romp. It’s kind of a modern-day vaudeville.

All children are love children, he said, but only the best ones are ever called that.

The funny thing is that I feel close to all my characters. Deep, deep inside them all.

The most deeply personal of my works are the non-fiction works, the autobiographical works, because there, I’m talking about myself very directly.

Human beings need stories, and we’re looking for them in all kinds of places; whether it’s television, whether it’s comic books or movies, radio plays, whatever form, people are hungry for stories.

He finds it extraordinary that on some mornings, just after he has woken up, as he bends down to tie his shoes, he is flooded with a happiness so intense, a happiness so naturally and...

As long as a man had the courage to reject what society told him to do, he could live life on his own terms. To what end? To be free. But free to what end?...

You can’t see yourself. You know what you look like because of mirrors and photographs, but out there in the world, as you move among your fellow human beings, whether strangers or friends or the...

There’s love, and certainly children you care about more than yourself. But nevertheless, we’re alone in our heads.

I think New York has evolved in my work just the way the city has.

I was perfectly calm and perfectly insane, perfectly prepared to accept what the moment had offered. Indifference of that magnitude is rare and because it can be achieved only by someone ready to let go...

Bit by bit, I found myself relaxing into the conversation. Kitty had a natural talent for drawing people out of themselves, and it was easy to fall in with her, to feel comfortable in her...

And if Amsterdam was hell, and if hell was a memory, then he realized that perhaps there was some purpose to his being lost. Cut off from everything that was familiar to him, unable to...

Those of us who can remember our childhoods will recall how ardently we relished the moment of the bedtime story, when our mother or father would sit down beside us in the semi-dark and read...

I really, truly believe that writing comes out of the body; of course, the mind is working as well, but it’s a double thing and that doubleness is united. I mean, you can’t separate persona...

I don’t know if she should worry too much, I mean some of our greatest writers have had movies made of their books, lots of Hemingway novels were turned into movies, it doesn’t hurt the...

The funny thing is, as a young person I was trying to write prose, and I wrote a lot of it, but I was never satisfied with the results. Two of the novels I wound...

Novels are fictions and therefore they tell lies, but through those lies every novelist attempts to tell the truth about the world.

I’ve always written by hand. Mostly with a fountain pen, but sometimes with a pencil – especially for corrections.

We construct a narrative for ourselves, and that’s the thread that we follow from one day to the next. People who disintegrate as personalities are the ones who lose that thread.

I believe that the whole idea of the consumer society is tottering. We’ve kept ourselves going by producing more and more goods, most of which people don’t need. I’m anti-consumerism; I own four pairs of...

Reason and memory are nearly always at odds.

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.