Fiction is burdened for me with a sense of duty.

Harvard has enough panegyrists without me.

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

Writing makes you more human.

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

Reagan has turned America into a tax haven.

Nature refuses to rest.

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

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

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

I have never liked haircuts.

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.

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.

People are incorrigibly themselves.

If the worst comes true, and the paper book joins the papyrus scroll and parchment codex in extinction, we will miss, I predict, a number of things about it.

In any interview, you do say more or less than you mean.

Existence itself does not feel horrible; it feels like an ecstasy, rather, which we have only to be still to experience.

Young or old, a writer sends a book into the world, not himself.

My father taught only math.