Occupation: Novelist Birth: March 19, 1933
For someone whose roots in America were strong but only inches deep, and who had no experience, such as a Catholic child might, of an awesome hierarc….
To become a celebrity is to become a brand name. There is Ivory Soap, Rice Krispies, and Philip Roth. Ivory is the soap that floats; Rice Krispies th….
I think I write or publish as much as I do because I can bear being without a book to work on..
The thought of the novelist lies not in the remarks of his characters or even in their introspection but in the plight he has invented for his charac….
He was no more, freed from being, entering into nowhere without even knowing it. Just as he'd feared from the start..
I don't wish to be a slave any longer to the stringent exigencies of literature..
What I would really love to happen to me would be if I came upon an idea that would keep me busy until I die so I wouldn't have to go through the bus….
Life is just a short period of time in which you are alive..
I often have to write a hundred pages or more before there's a paragraph that's alive..
It isn't that you subordinate your ideas to the force of the facts in autobiography but that you construct a sequence of stories to bind up the facts….
The secret to living in the rush of the world with a minimum of pain is to get as many people as possible to string along with your delusions; the tr….
You don't want to repeat yourself for one. You don't want to fall into the clichés for another. And you don't want to be licentious really. You want ….
Literature got me into this mess and literature is going to have to get me out of it..
To read a novel requires a certain kind of concentration, focus, devotion to the reading. If you read a novel in more than two weeks, you don't read ….
The only obsession everyone wants: 'love.' People think that in falling in love they make themselves whole? The Platonic union of souls? I think othe….
I do not say correct or savory. I do not say seemly or even natural. I say serious. Sensationally serious. Unspeakably serious. Solemnly, recklessly,….
My God! The English language is a form of communication! Conversation isn't just crossfire where you shoot and get shot at! Where you've got to duck ….
What I have in mind when I start to write could fit inside an acorn-an acorn, moreover, that rarely if ever grows into an oak. Write fiction and you ….
Many of the Kiwis appearing in powerful business circles around the world come from accounting backgrounds. Yet often people have preset ideas of how….
a father for whom everything is an unshakable duty, for whom there is a right way and a wrong way and nothing in between, a father whose compound of ….
For discipline is imposed not just on oneself but on those in one's orbit..