I was in the book, and the book was in my head, and as long as I stayed inside my head, I could go on writing the book. It was like living in a padded...

The truth of the story lies in the details.

Memory is the space in which a thing happens for a second time.

Writing makes you feel that there is a reason to go on living. If I couldn’t write, I would stop breathing.

I never experiment with anything in my books. Experimentation means you don’t know what you’re doing.

I’m really trying to dredge up what one might call intellectual and moral material. For example, when do you realize that you are an American? What age does that happen to you? When do you...

To care about words, to have a stake in what is written, to believe in the power of books – this overwhelms the rest, and beside it one’s life becomes very small.

It’s extremely difficult to get these jobs because you can’t get a job on a ship unless you have seaman’s paper’s, and you can’t get seaman’s papers unless you have a job on a ship....

Some like to think that a keen appreciation of art can actually make us better people – more just, more moral, more sensitive, more understanding. Perhaps that is true – in certain rare, isolated cases.

Becoming a writer is not a ‘career decision’ like becoming a doctor or a policeman. You don’t choose it so much as get chosen, and once you accept the fact that you’re not fit for...

The book is your book. You have been responsible for every single thing on every page, every comma, every syllable is your work.

It is also true that memory sometimes comes to him as a voice. It is a voice that speaks inside him, and it is not necessarily his own. It speaks to him in the way...

Try to roll with the punches. Keep your chin up. Don’t take any wooden nickels. Vote Democrat in every election. Ride your bike in the park. Dream about my perfect, golden body. Take your vitamins....

I like the sound a typewriter makes.

Every generation always thinks it was better before, and I think people have been saying this for probably thousands of years.

You see the film, you might be entertained, and if it’s not a great film, it loses its power very quickly. I think even simply acceptable books stay with us a lot longer.

If you look into someone’s face long enough, eventually you’re going to feel that you’re looking at yourself.

but even the facts do not always tell the truth

Words tend to last a big longer than things, but eventually they fade too, along with the pictures they once evoked. Entire categories of objects disappear – flowerpots, for example, or cigarette filters, or rubber...

Holes in the memory. You grab on to some things, others have completely disappeared.

I really do feel part of America to my very bones; at the same time, I know that I come from somewhere else.

The book that convinced me I wanted to be a writer was ‘Crime and Punishment’. I put the thing down after reading it in a fever over two or three days… I said, ‘If this...

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...

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 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?

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...

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.

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.

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...

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.

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...

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?...