Truth should not be forced; it should simply manifest itself, like a woman who has in her privacy reflected and coolly decided to bestow herself upon a certain man.

Writers may be disreputable, incorrigible, early to decay or late to bloom but they dare to go it alone.

The essential self is innocent, and when it tastes its own innocence knows that it lives for ever.

Toni Morrison has a habit, perhaps traceable to the pernicious influence of William Faulkner, of plunging into the narrative before the reader has a clue to what is going on.

I would write ads for deodorants or labels for catsup bottles if I had to.

I seem most instinctively to believe in the human value of creative writing, whether in the form of verse or fiction, as a mode of truth-telling, self-expression and homage to the twin miracles of creation and consciousness.

The first breath of adultery is the freest; after it, constraints aping marriage develop.

By the mid-17th century, telescopes had improved enough to make visible the seasonally growing and shrinking polar ice caps on Mars, and features such as Syrtis Major, a dark patch thought to be a shallow sea.

Golf appeals to the idiot in us and the child. Just how childlike golf players become is proven by their frequent inability to count past five.

The theme of old age doesn't seem to fascinate Hollywood.

The inner spaces that a good story lets us enter are the old apartments of religion.

When I write, I aim in my mind not toward New York but toward a vague spot a little to the east of Kansas.

To be a human being is to be in a state of tension between your appetites and your dreams, and the social realities around you and your obligations to your fellow man.

The essential support and encouragement comes from within, arising out of the mad notion that your society needs to know what only you can tell it.

American art in general... takes to surreal exaggerations and metaphors; but its Puritan work ethic has little use for the playful self-indulgence behind Parisian Surrealism.

Bookstores are lonely forts, spilling light onto the sidewalk. They civilize their neighborhoods.

We take our bearings, daily, from others. To be sane is, to a great extent, to be sociable.

A house, having been willfully purchased and furnished, tells us more than a body, and its description is a foremost resource of the art of fiction.

Customs and convictions change; respectable people are the last to know, or to admit, the change, and the ones most offended by fresh reflections of the facts in the mirror of art.

Sometimes it seems the whole purpose of pets is to bring death into the house.

My first ambition was to be an animator for Walt Disney. Then I wanted to be a magazine cartoonist.

An affair wants to spill, to share its glory with the world. No act is so private it does not seek applause.

Tiger Woods did not always win majors with ease; after his narrow victory in the 1999 PGA, he slumped and sighed as if he'd been carrying rocks uphill all afternoon.

Billy Collins writes lovely poems. Limpid, gently and consistently startling, more serious than they seem, they describe all the worlds that are and were and some others besides.

Hobbies take place in the cellar and smell of airplane glue.

That a marriage ends is less than ideal; but all things end under heaven, and if temporality is held to be invalidating, then nothing real succeeds.

An aging writer has the not insignificant satisfaction of a shelf of books behind him that, as they wait for their ideal readers to discover them, will outlast him for a while.

In tennis, there is the forehand, the backhand, the overhead smash and the drop volley, all with a different grip.

The writers we tend to universally admire, like Beckett, or Kafka, or TS Eliot, are not very prolific.

I see no intrinsic reason why a doubly talented artist might not arise and create a comic-strip novel masterpiece.

From infancy on, we are all spies; the shame is not this but that the secrets to be discovered are so paltry and few.

I don't know; I think I'd be gloomy without some faith that there is a purpose and there is a kind of witness to my life.

A narrative is like a room on whose walls a number of false doors have been painted; while within the narrative, we have many apparent choices of exit, but when the author leads us to one particular door, we know it is the right one because it opens.

Writing criticism is to writing fiction and poetry as hugging the shore is to sailing in the open sea.

What interests me is why men think of women as witches. It's because they're so fascinating and exasperating, so other.

It is in middles that extremes clash, where ambiguity restlessly rules.

A number of American colleges are willing to pay a tempting amount to pinch and poke an author for a day or two.

In fiction, imaginary people become realer to us than any named celebrity glimpsed in a series of rumored events, whose causes and subtler ramifications must remain in the dark. An invented figure like Anna Karenina or Emma Bovary emerges fully into the light of understanding, which brings with it identification, sympathy and pity.

Government is either organized benevolence or organized madness; its peculiar magnitude permits no shading.

Eros is everywhere. It is what binds.

Smaller than a breadbox, bigger than a TV remote, the average book fits into the human hand with a seductive nestling, a kiss of texture, whether of cover cloth, glazed jacket, or flexible paperback.

Imagine writing a poem with a sweating, worried-looking boy handing you a different pencil at the end of every word. My golf, you may say, is no poem; nevertheless, I keep wanting it to be one.

The refusal to rest content, the willingness to risk excess on behalf of one's obsessions, is what distinguishes artists from entertainers, and what makes some artists adventurers on behalf of us all.

John Barth, I think, was really a writer of my own age and somewhat of my own temperament, although his books are very different from mine, and he has been a spokesman for the very ambitious, long, rather academic novel. But I don't think that what he is saying, so far as I understand it, is so very different from what I'm saying.

I find in my own writing that only fiction - and rarely, a poem - fully tests me to the kind of limits of what I know and what I feel.

For a long time, I was under the impression that 'Terry and the Pirates' was the best comic strip in the United States.

Four years was enough of Harvard. I still had a lot to learn, but had been given the liberating notion that now I could teach myself.

New York is a city with virtually no habitable public space - only private spaces expensively maintained within the general disaster.

Belief, like love, must be voluntary.

My interest generally is the hidden Americans; the ones who live far away from the headlines.