Occupation: Novelist Birth: March 19, 1933
Too late, but I understand. That we don't perish of understanding everything too late, that is a miracle. But we do perish of that -- of just that..
I turn sentences around. That's my life. I write a sentence and then I turn it around. Then I look at it and I turn it around again. Then I have lunc….
All that we don't know is astonishing. Even more astonishing is what passes for knowing..
Nothing has a more sinister effect on art than the artist's desire to prove that he's good. The terrible temptation of idealism!.
Sex is all the enchantment required. Do men find women so enchanting once the sex is taken out? Does anyone find anyone that enchanting unless they h….
You tasted it. Isn't that enough? Of what do you ever get more than a taste? That's all we're given in life, that's all we're given of life. A taste.….
How can one say, 'No, this isn't a part of life,' since it always is? The contaminant of sex, the redeeming corruption that de-idealizes the species ….
When he [Joe Lewis] was asked upon his retirement about his long career, Joe sweetly summed it up in just ten words. 'I did the best I could with wha….
The danger with hatred is, once you start in on it, you get a hundred times more than you bargained for. Once you start, you can't stop..
Old age isn't a battle; old age is a massacre..
World War III will be triggered off not by suppressed nationalists seeking political independence, as happened the first time around when the Serbs a….
No matter how much you know, no matter how much you think, no matter how much you plot and you connive and you plan, you're not superior to sex. It's….
I have a slogan I use when I get anxious writing, which happens quite a bit: ‘the ordeal is part of the commitment.’ It’s one of my mantras. It makes….
I kept waiting for him to lay bare something more than this pointed unobjectionableness, but all that rose to the surface was more surface.
I don’t ask writers about their work habits. I really don’t care. Joyce Carol Oates says somewhere that when writers ask each other what time they st….
I came to New York and in only hours, New York did what it does to people: awakened the possibilities. Hope breaks out..
I was gushing and I knew it. I surprised myself with my eagerness to please, felt myself saying too much, explaining too much, overinvolved and overe….
You can no more make someone tell the truth than you can force someone to love you..
A Jewish man with parents alive is a fifteen-year-old boy, and will remain a fifteen-year-old boy until they die!.
A writer has to be driven crazy to help him to see. A writer needs his poisons..
It's the little questions from women about tappets that finally push men over the edge..