Memory, therefore, not simply as the resurrection of one’s private past, but an immersion in the past of others, which is to say: history – which one both participates in and is a witness to,...

I’m living in the present, thinking about the past, hoping for the future.

I guess the toughest things in translations are word play, which can never be reproduced exactly.

No book includes the entire world. It’s limited. And so it doesn’t seem like an aesthetic compromise to have to do that. There’s so much other material to write about.

I make no excuse for what happened. Drunkenness is never more than a symptom, not an absolute cause, and I realize that it would be wrong of me to try to defend myself. Nevertheless, there...

Deep down, I don’t believe it takes any special talent for a person to lift himself off the ground and hover in the air. We all have it in us—every man, woman, and child—and with...

You’re too good for this world, and because of that the world will eventually crush you.

Our lifelong certainties about the world can be demolished in a single second.

I can never say ‘why’ about anything I do. I suppose I can say ‘how’ and ‘when’ and ‘what.’ But ‘why’ is impenetrable to me.

I’m generous. I give good tips. It’s just – the way I live my life, ironically enough, is: I don’t want anything. I’m not a consumer. I don’t crave objects.

Your mind is on the moon, and from the looks of things, it’s nevergoing to be anywhere else. You have no ambitions, you don’t give a damn about money, and you’retoo much of a philosopher...

Writing is a solitary business. It takes over your life. In some sense, a writer has no life of his own. Even when he’s there, he’s not really there.

The human body is strange and flawed and unpredictable. The human body has many secrets, and it does not divulge them to anyone, except those who have learned to wait.

I started out in life as a poet; I was only writing poetry all through my 20s. It wasn’t until I was about 30 that I got serious about writing prose. While I was writing...

You tend to feel very hurt when people attack you and feel indifferent when you get praise. You think, ‘Of course they like it. They should like it.’

In the mid-70s I wrote some plays, also, but it wasn’t until the very late ’70s when I ran into a real crisis on every level, personal, artistic, and I was absolutely broke, I’d run...

I hear her slip into bed with him, and I hear everything that happens after that. Sex is such a strange and sloppy business, why bother to recount every slurp and moan that ensued? Tom...

Stories surge up out of nowhere, and if they feel compelling, you follow them. You let them unfold inside you and see where they are going to lead.

There’s hope for everyone. That’s what makes the world go round.

Writing is such a strange, utterly mysterious process. First, there was nothing; then, suddenly, there was something. I don’t know where thoughts are born. Where the hell does it come from? I don’t know. I...

Paintings. Or the collapse of time in images.

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...

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...

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.

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.

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...

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...

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

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.