Most Americans haven't had my happy experience of living for thirteen years in a seventeenth-century house, since most of America lacks seventeenth-century houses.

Perhaps I have written fiction because everything unambiguously expressed seems somehow crass to me; and when the subject is myself, I want to jeer and weep.

I have never liked haircuts.

Publishers are looking for blockbusters - all the world loves a megaseller.

The Internet doesn't like you to learn too much about explosives.

My life is, in a sense, trash. My life is only that of which the residue is my writing.

Nature refuses to rest.

Reagan has turned America into a tax haven.

Some stories or passages are more difficult and demand more fussing with than others, but, in general, I'm a two-draft writer rather than a six-draft writer, or whatever.

If men do not keep on speaking terms with children, they cease to be men, and become merely machines for eating and for earning money.

I was trying to support a family with writing. I didn't have a private income. I had no other profession.

I still want to give my public, such as it is, a book a year.

A person believes various things at various times, even on the same day.

In art, anything goes, and if it goes, it goes.

Writing makes you more human.

My wife and I had children when we were children ourselves.

Harvard has enough panegyrists without me.

Fiction is burdened for me with a sense of duty.

In becoming an icon, it is useful to die young.

Books externalise our brains and turn our homes into thinking bodies.

If my mother hadn't been trying to be a writer, I don't know if I would have thought of it myself.

I love Shillington not as one loves Capri or New York, because they are special, but as one loves one's own body and consciousness, because they are synonymous with being.

I've always tried to write about America. It's very worth a writer's effort.

Somehow, it is hard to dislike a man once you have played a round of golf with him.

It's so hard to make a good tee shot after a birdie.

New York is, of course, many cities, and an exile does not return to the one he left.

I must say, when I reread myself, it's the poetry I tend to look at. It's the most exciting to write, and it's over the quickest.

I like short stories.