How can people think that artists seek a name? There is no such thing as an artist - only the world, lit or unlit, as the world allows.

I can't dance anymore. Total knee replacements. I can't do anything anymore.

I woke in bits, like all children, piecemeal over the years. I discovered myself and the world, and forgot them, and discovered them again.

I worked so hard all my life, and all I want to do now is read.

If you're going to publish a book, you probably are going to make a fool of yourself.

It's a little silly to finally learn how to write at this age. But I long ago realized I was secretly sincere.

Matters of taste are not, it turns out, moral issues.

Much has been written about the life of the mind.

Our family was on the lunatic fringe. My mother was always completely irrepressible. My father made crowd noises into a microphone.

The mind of the writer does indeed do something before it dies, and so does its owner, but I would be hard put to call it living.

The Pulitzer is more useful than meaningful.

The writer studies literature, not the world.

The writer studies literature, not the world. He is careful of what he reads, for that is what he will write.

When I teach, I preach. I thump the Bible. I exhort my students morally. I talk to them about the dedicated life.

Write about winter in the summer.

Write as if you were dying.

You can't test courage cautiously.

There is a certain age at which a child looks at you in all earnestness and delivers a long, pleased speech in all the true inflections of spoken English, but with not one recognizable syllable.

I noticed this process of waking, and predicted with terrifying logic that one of these years not far away I would be awake continuously and never slip back, and never be free of myself again.

People love pretty much the same things best. A writer looking for subjects inquires not after what he loves best, but after what he alone loves at all.