Religion enables us to ignore nothingness and get on with the jobs of life.

New York, like the Soviet Union, has this universal usefulness: It makes you glad you live elsewhere.

Some golfers, we are told, enjoy the landscape; but properly, the landscape shrivels and compresses into the grim, surrealistically vivid patch of grass directly under the golfer's eyes as he morosely walks toward where he thinks his ball might be.

I suppose sequels are inevitable for a writer of a certain age.

The miracle of turning inklings into thoughts and thoughts into words and words into metal and print and ink never palls for me.

I'm trying to get the terrorist out of the bugaboo category and into the category of a fellow human being.

The lust to meet authors ranks low, I think, on the roll of holy appetites; but it is an authentic pang.

Reminiscence and self-parody are part of remaining true to oneself.

It is not an aesthetic misstep to make the viewer aware of the paint and the painter's hand. Such an empathetic awareness lies at the heart of aesthetic appreciation.

Humor is my default mode.

I was raised in the Depression, when there was a great sense of dog-eat-dog and people fighting over scraps.

There's something very reassuring... about the written record.

My attempt has been really to, beyond making a record of contemporary life, which is what you inevitably do, is trying to make beautiful books - books that are in some way beautiful, that are models of how to use the language, models of honest feeling, models of care.

America is beyond power; it acts as in a dream, as a face of God. Wherever America is, there is freedom, and wherever America is not, madness rules with chains, darkness strangles millions. Beneath her patient bombers, paradise is possible.

For many years, I read mystery novels for relaxation. But my tastes were too narrow - and, having read all of Agatha Christie and John Dickson Carr, I discovered that the implausibility and the thinness of the people distracted me unduly from the plot.

Art is like baby shoes. When you coat them with gold, they can no longer be worn.

As movers and the moved both know, books are heavy freight, the weight of refrigerators and sofas broken up into cardboard boxes. They make us think twice about changing addresses.

I know more about what it's like to be elderly and infirm and kind of stupid, the way you get forgetful, but on the other hand I'm a littler, wiser, dare we say? The word 'wisdom' has kind of faded out of our vocabulary, but yeah, I'm a little wiser.

I don't write about too many male businessmen, and I'm not apt to write about too many female businessmen.

A lot of the Koran does not speak very eloquently to a Westerner. Much of it is either legalistic or opaquely poetic.

There is no pleasing New Englanders, my dear, their soil is all rocks and their hearts are bloodless absolutes.

Authors should be honored only for their works.

To guarantee the individual maximum freedom within a social frame of minimal laws ensures - if not happiness - its hopeful pursuit.

There's a crystallization that goes on in a poem which the young man can bring off, but which the middle-aged man can't.

The rich - they just live in another realm, really.

The good ending dismisses us with a touch of ceremony and throws a backward light of significance over the story just read. It makes it, as they say, or unmakes it. A weak beginning is forgettable, but the end of a story bulks in the reader's mind like the giant foot in a foreshortened photograph.

A room containing Philip Roth, I have noticed, begins hilariously to whirl and pulse with a mix of rebelliousness and constriction that I take to be Oedipal.

Memory has a spottiness, as if the film was sprinkled with developer instead of immersed in it.

I never really made a choice to live in America, so I should be aware of the social strata outside of the ones that I may live in.

Baseball skills schizophrenically encompass a pitcher's, a batter's and a fielder's.

I think books should have secrets, like people do.

I'm a dull person.

The reader knows the writer better than he knows himself; but the writer's physical presence is light from a star that has moved on.

A seventeenth-century house can be recognized by its steep roof, massive central chimney and utter porchlessness. Some of those houses have a second-story overhang, emphasizing their medieval look.

Without books, we might just melt into the airwaves and be just another set of blips.

Until the 20th century it was generally assumed that a writer had said what he had to say in his works.

I think my first story sold for $550. This was in 1954, and it seemed like quite a lot of money, and I said to myself, 'Hey, I'm a professional writer now.'

My generation was maybe the last in which you could set up shop as a writer and hope to make a living at it.

I think you remember certain phrases from bad reviews. You don't remember all the bad reviews.

There should always be something gratuitous about art, just as there seems to be, according to the new-wave cosmologists, something gratuitous about the universe.

My transition from wanting to be a cartoonist to wanting to be a writer may have come about through that friendly opposition, that even-handed pairing, of pictures and words.

But for a few phrases from his letters and an odd line or two of his verse, the poet walks gagged through his own biography.

The firmest house in my fiction, probably, is the little thick-walled sandstone farmhouse of 'The Centaur' and 'Of the Farm'; I had lived in that house, and can visualize every floorboard and bit of worn molding.

We don't really want to think that the artist is only very skilled, that he has merely devoted his life to perfecting a certain set of intelligible skills.

In a city like New York, you're aware of the rich and poor.

All love comes from the family.

The substance of fictional architecture is not bricks and mortar but evanescent consciousness.

The study of literature threatens to become a kind of paleontology of failure, and criticism a supercilious psychoanalysis of authors.

There's almost nothing worse to live with than a struggling artist.

For some of us, books are intrinsic to our sense of personal identity.