The choice between starving and being eaten is an exotic one.

We write out of revenge against reality, to dream and enter the lives of others.

One learns much more by writing fiction, because the insights come from those deeper subconscious levels where the greater and more interesting truths lie.

Americans and their desire to be novelists, the American novel should be listed in medical dictionaries alongside Megalomania and Obsessional Neuroses.

Only friends will tell you the truths you need to hear to make your life bearable.

Why are there no great women artists?' sounds as ignorant of human geography as the query 'Why are there no Eskimo tennis teams?

I shall never cease to marvel at the way we beg for love and tyranny.

All our parents have levels of deviousness. We're driven to write about this discrepancy between the bright shining selves they invented and the monsters lurking underneath.

Art is both a vengeance against reality and a reconciliation with it.

I venture that those of us who are most serene when faced with the possibility of nothingness are the ones who've reached furthest to the downward and upward of their beings.

As to why people like Joseph Lelyveld are writing memoirs, I think they're just catching on the coattails of the trend.

The middle is the longest in any story, and therefore the time with the most desperation.

Come what come may, time and the hour run through the roughest day.

It is when tomorrow's burden is added to the burden of today that the weight is more than a man can bear.

It is easier to prevent bad habits than to break them.

When I opened Wikipedia, it had three articles, yet it was called an encyclopedia.

I put things down on sheets of paper and stuff them in my pockets. When I have enough, I have a book.

We're essentially continuing a system where profits are privatized and...losses socialized.

Education in a deepest sense has always been about doing rather than about knowing.

I would want to get rid of the piracy.

Football is all about winning things as a team but it's also important to pick up individual awards along the way.