We hear things, but we can't always see them, or, even if we do see them, we're not sure that we're seeing correctly. Hence: Invisible..

I've found that writing novels is an all-absorbing experience - both physical and mental - and I have to do it every day in order to keep the rhythm,….

I still believe we wasted a golden opportunity to make significant changes in our country. I think people in America would have been ready and willin….

Medical care for the entire country seems to me a basic right. If every other country in the West can do it, why can't we?.

I write the paragraph, then I'm crossing out, changing words, trying to improve it. When it seems more or less OK, then I type it up because sometime….

I'm not a boy-writer, I've never been. I wanted to be a boy-writer when I was young, and I think that held me back. I wanted to be very clever, and f….

When I think of Tokyo Story, yeah, it is like a novella. That doesn't mean it's not great. Some of my favorite Tolstoy works are his novellas..

We exist for ourselves, perhaps, and at times we even have a glimmer of who we are, but in the end we can never be sure, and as our lives go on, we b….

I think I hate cynicism more than anything else. It's the curse of our age, and I want to avoid it at all costs..

I'm really trying to dredge up what one might call intellectual and moral material. For example, when do you realize that you are an American? What a….

I've been very lucky in this second marriage. It's just luck. It's absolute luck. And I can only marvel at it. So many other things could have happen….

We're outsiders, and so when we walk through the city, we're there and not there at the same time, participating and observing simultaneously..

We are left with nothing but death, the irreducible fact of our own mortality. Death after a long illness we can accept with resignation. Even accide….

A here exists only in relation to a there, not the other way around. There's this only because there's that; if we don't look up, we'll never know wh….

I like the sound a typewriter makes..

Novels are fictions and therefore they tell lies, but through those lies every novelist attempts to tell the truth about the world..

It always stimulates me to discover new examples of my own prejudice and stupidity, to realize that I don't know half as much as I think I do..

To leave the world a little better than you found it. That's the best a man can ever do..

I think most writers can't really think about their work without a kind of revulsion. And I think that's probably why we keep going back and trying a….

I've written books that have taken me fifteen years, from first sentence to last, and some that only take three or four months..

Everything can change at any moment, suddenly and forever..