First-book novelists and storywriters haven't yet failed and so it's easier to publish them - you can gamble on a success. Whereas someone who has wr….

If you can propose a memoir, even if you are eighteen years old - and what do you remember? What are you memeing? If you can propose a memoir, I beli….

Never use 'submit' as a verb for sending work to magazine or book publishers; say 'offer,' and never, ever submit. Keep your knees unbent. Be brave..

Good art is a form of prayer. It's a way to say what is not sayable..

If there is some blood on the pages then you have some readership..

What to know about pain is how little we do to deserve it, how simple it is to give, how hard to lose..

Baseball is a game where you are always waiting, and then when something happens it's like turning a kaleidoscope when you were a kid..

The best defense is a good story..

I love baseball. What I love about baseball is that you are always waiting..

Nonfiction, for the most part, is facts, and it's "how I was mistreated. I was mistreated. Were you mistreated? Weren't we all mistreated?".

People do not read, by and large. They watch television..

Oh, a bookshop. Why not pop in and buy a little Kant? And perhaps just a quarter-pound of Kafka. Don't bother to wrap it, thanks. I'll eat it here..

If a writer is honest, if what is at stake for him can seem to matter to his readers, then his work may be read. But a writer will work anyway, as I ….

I don't think I want to write a third book. But the more people talk to me about it, the more I think maybe I do..

I have found myself writing poetry shortly after I retired. Which I hadn't done in forty years..

When you are writing a character, what the character says is obviously crucial. But what the character doesn't say is absolutely as important as his ….

The education of young people is narrowing. They cannot have the scope they used to have. They are being taught in high school by people earnest, sti….

I always had good students..

The people who make reality are angry peasants with old cannon shells wired together, an anti-vehicle device..

Hollywood is the model for publishing, more and more. Not just blockbusters either..

We are herding the young in that direction so that they are not sitting still and contemplating, Goddamn it, a page of exquisite prose by Charles Dic….