Most people are participating in the grand adventure of living with one another..

Impossible, I realize, to enter another’s solitude. If it is true that we can ever come to know another human being, even to a small degree, it is on….

I use things, I steal things from my life when I want to, when I need to, or when it seems appropriate. But most of the stuff in my novels is entirel….

When I look back at experience [with my father], all I can do is feel pity. You know, how torn he was about how to act, what to say. And it seems an ….

Everyone reads a different book. That's what's interesting. Everyone sees a different film, as well. We bring our past lives to whatever work of art ….

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'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….

Take a report. It's dry, the sentences are clunky and unfelicitous, they're just conveying information. But it seems to me that if you're fully engag….

Every man is the author of his own life..

Artists are the people for whom the world is not enough..

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….

Paintings. Or the collapse of time in images..

I started out in life as a poet, I was only writing poetry all through my 20s, it wasn't until I was about 30 that I got serious about writing prose.….

I guess I wanted to leave America for awhile. It wasn't that I wanted to become an expatriate, or just never come back, I needed some breathing room.….

For the first time in his life, he stopped worrying about results, and as a consequence the terms “success” and “failure” had suddenly lost their mea….

I don't like pictures in books. I feel that the pictures diminish the words, and the words diminish the pictures, and it doesn't work..

There's hope for everyone. That's what makes the world go round..

In the end, each life is no more than the sum of contingent facts, a chronicle of chance intersections, of flukes, of random events that divulge nothi….

it's a rare day when she speaks in anything but platitudes--all those exhausted phrases and hand-me-down ideas that cram the dump sites of contempora….

I would say that Edgar Allan Poe, [Georges] Perec, Thomas Pynchon, and [Jorge Luis] Borges are all boy-writers. These are writers who take... a kind ….

We have missed him in the sunshine, in the storm, in the twilight, ever since..