Rain is grace; rain is the sky descending to the earth; without rain, there would be no life.

What art offers is space - a certain breathing room for the spirit.

We are most alive when we're in love.

Dreams come true; without that possibility, nature would not incite us to have them.

Creativity is merely a plus name for regular activity. Any activity becomes creative when the doer cares about doing it right, or better.

Sex is like money; only too much is enough.

Professionalism in art has this difficulty: To be professional is to be dependable, to be dependable is to be predictable, and predictability is esthetically boring - an anti-virtue in a field where we hope to be astonished and startled and at some deep level refreshed.

Being naked approaches being revolutionary; going barefoot is mere populism.

A healthy male adult bore consumes each year one and a half times his own weight in other people's patience.

Every marriage tends to consist of an aristocrat and a peasant. Of a teacher and a learner.

Any activity becomes creative when the doer cares about doing it right or better.

The cinema has done more for my spiritual life than the church. My ideas of fame, success and beauty all originate from the big screen. Whereas Christian religion is retreating everywhere and losing more and more influence; film has filled the vacuum and supports us with myths and action-controlling images.

Golf's ultimate moral instruction directs us to find within ourselves a pivotal center of enjoyment: relax into a rhythm that fits the hills and swales, and play the shot at hand - not the last one, or the next one, but the one at your feet, in the poison ivy, where you put it.

Mars has long exerted a pull on the human imagination. The erratically moving red star in the sky was seen as sinister or violent by the ancients: The Greeks identified it with Ares, the god of war; the Babylonians named it after Nergal, god of the underworld. To the ancient Chinese, it was Ying-huo, the fire planet.

Each morning my characters greet me with misty faces willing, though chilled, to muster for another day's progress through the dazzling quicksand the marsh of blank paper.

The dwelling places of Europe have an air of inheritance, or cumulative possession - a hive occupied by generations of bees.

A leader is one who, out of madness or goodness, volunteers to take upon himself the woe of the people. There are few men so foolish, hence the erratic quality of leadership in the world.

We do survive every moment, after all, except the last one.

We're past the age of heroes and hero kings... Most of our lives are basically mundane and dull, and it's up to the writer to find ways to make them interesting.

America is a vast conspiracy to make you happy.

Celebrity is a mask that eats into the face.

Most of American life consists of driving somewhere and then returning home, wondering why the hell you went.

I was an only child. I needed an alternative to family life - to real life, you could almost say - and cartoons, pictures in a book, the animated movies, seemed to provide it.

To be President of the United States, sir, is to act as advocate for a blind, venomous, and ungrateful client.

Gods don't answer letters.

When I was born, my parents and my mother's parents planted a dogwood tree in the side yard of the large white house in which we lived throughout my boyhood. This tree I learned quite early, was exactly my age - was, in a sense, me.

The writer must face the fact that ordinary lives are what most people live most of the time, and that the novel as a narration of the fantastic and the adventurous is really an escapist plot; that aesthetically, the ordinary, the banal, is what you must deal with.

My last vivid boyhood fright from books came when I was 15; I was visiting my uncle and aunt in Greenwich, and, emboldened by my success with 'The Waste Land,' I opened their copy of 'Ulysses.' The whiff of death off those remorseless, closely written pages overpowered me. So: back to soluble mysteries, and jokes that were not cosmic.

The Founding Fathers in their wisdom decided that children were an unnatural strain on parents. So they provided jails called schools, equipped with tortures called an education.

For male and female alike, the bodies of the other sex are messages signaling what we must do, they are glowing signifiers of our own necessities.

Truth should not be forced; it should simply manifest itself, like a woman who has in her privacy reflected and coolly decided to bestow herself upon a certain man.

Writers may be disreputable, incorrigible, early to decay or late to bloom but they dare to go it alone.

The essential self is innocent, and when it tastes its own innocence knows that it lives for ever.

Toni Morrison has a habit, perhaps traceable to the pernicious influence of William Faulkner, of plunging into the narrative before the reader has a clue to what is going on.

I would write ads for deodorants or labels for catsup bottles if I had to.

I seem most instinctively to believe in the human value of creative writing, whether in the form of verse or fiction, as a mode of truth-telling, self-expression and homage to the twin miracles of creation and consciousness.

The first breath of adultery is the freest; after it, constraints aping marriage develop.

By the mid-17th century, telescopes had improved enough to make visible the seasonally growing and shrinking polar ice caps on Mars, and features such as Syrtis Major, a dark patch thought to be a shallow sea.

Golf appeals to the idiot in us and the child. Just how childlike golf players become is proven by their frequent inability to count past five.

The theme of old age doesn't seem to fascinate Hollywood.

The inner spaces that a good story lets us enter are the old apartments of religion.

When I write, I aim in my mind not toward New York but toward a vague spot a little to the east of Kansas.

To be a human being is to be in a state of tension between your appetites and your dreams, and the social realities around you and your obligations to your fellow man.

The essential support and encouragement comes from within, arising out of the mad notion that your society needs to know what only you can tell it.

American art in general... takes to surreal exaggerations and metaphors; but its Puritan work ethic has little use for the playful self-indulgence behind Parisian Surrealism.

Bookstores are lonely forts, spilling light onto the sidewalk. They civilize their neighborhoods.

We take our bearings, daily, from others. To be sane is, to a great extent, to be sociable.

A house, having been willfully purchased and furnished, tells us more than a body, and its description is a foremost resource of the art of fiction.

Customs and convictions change; respectable people are the last to know, or to admit, the change, and the ones most offended by fresh reflections of the facts in the mirror of art.

Sometimes it seems the whole purpose of pets is to bring death into the house.