My first ambition was to be an animator for Walt Disney. Then I wanted to be a magazine cartoonist.

An affair wants to spill, to share its glory with the world. No act is so private it does not seek applause.

Tiger Woods did not always win majors with ease; after his narrow victory in the 1999 PGA, he slumped and sighed as if he'd been carrying rocks uphill all afternoon.

Billy Collins writes lovely poems. Limpid, gently and consistently startling, more serious than they seem, they describe all the worlds that are and were and some others besides.

Hobbies take place in the cellar and smell of airplane glue.

That a marriage ends is less than ideal; but all things end under heaven, and if temporality is held to be invalidating, then nothing real succeeds.

An aging writer has the not insignificant satisfaction of a shelf of books behind him that, as they wait for their ideal readers to discover them, will outlast him for a while.

In tennis, there is the forehand, the backhand, the overhead smash and the drop volley, all with a different grip.

The writers we tend to universally admire, like Beckett, or Kafka, or TS Eliot, are not very prolific.

I see no intrinsic reason why a doubly talented artist might not arise and create a comic-strip novel masterpiece.

From infancy on, we are all spies; the shame is not this but that the secrets to be discovered are so paltry and few.

I don't know; I think I'd be gloomy without some faith that there is a purpose and there is a kind of witness to my life.

A narrative is like a room on whose walls a number of false doors have been painted; while within the narrative, we have many apparent choices of exit, but when the author leads us to one particular door, we know it is the right one because it opens.

Writing criticism is to writing fiction and poetry as hugging the shore is to sailing in the open sea.

What interests me is why men think of women as witches. It's because they're so fascinating and exasperating, so other.

It is in middles that extremes clash, where ambiguity restlessly rules.

A number of American colleges are willing to pay a tempting amount to pinch and poke an author for a day or two.

In fiction, imaginary people become realer to us than any named celebrity glimpsed in a series of rumored events, whose causes and subtler ramifications must remain in the dark. An invented figure like Anna Karenina or Emma Bovary emerges fully into the light of understanding, which brings with it identification, sympathy and pity.

Government is either organized benevolence or organized madness; its peculiar magnitude permits no shading.

Eros is everywhere. It is what binds.

Smaller than a breadbox, bigger than a TV remote, the average book fits into the human hand with a seductive nestling, a kiss of texture, whether of cover cloth, glazed jacket, or flexible paperback.

Imagine writing a poem with a sweating, worried-looking boy handing you a different pencil at the end of every word. My golf, you may say, is no poem; nevertheless, I keep wanting it to be one.

The refusal to rest content, the willingness to risk excess on behalf of one's obsessions, is what distinguishes artists from entertainers, and what makes some artists adventurers on behalf of us all.

John Barth, I think, was really a writer of my own age and somewhat of my own temperament, although his books are very different from mine, and he has been a spokesman for the very ambitious, long, rather academic novel. But I don't think that what he is saying, so far as I understand it, is so very different from what I'm saying.

I find in my own writing that only fiction - and rarely, a poem - fully tests me to the kind of limits of what I know and what I feel.

For a long time, I was under the impression that 'Terry and the Pirates' was the best comic strip in the United States.

Four years was enough of Harvard. I still had a lot to learn, but had been given the liberating notion that now I could teach myself.

New York is a city with virtually no habitable public space - only private spaces expensively maintained within the general disaster.

Belief, like love, must be voluntary.

My interest generally is the hidden Americans; the ones who live far away from the headlines.

Religion enables us to ignore nothingness and get on with the jobs of life.

New York, like the Soviet Union, has this universal usefulness: It makes you glad you live elsewhere.

Some golfers, we are told, enjoy the landscape; but properly, the landscape shrivels and compresses into the grim, surrealistically vivid patch of grass directly under the golfer's eyes as he morosely walks toward where he thinks his ball might be.

I suppose sequels are inevitable for a writer of a certain age.

The miracle of turning inklings into thoughts and thoughts into words and words into metal and print and ink never palls for me.

I'm trying to get the terrorist out of the bugaboo category and into the category of a fellow human being.

The lust to meet authors ranks low, I think, on the roll of holy appetites; but it is an authentic pang.

Reminiscence and self-parody are part of remaining true to oneself.

It is not an aesthetic misstep to make the viewer aware of the paint and the painter's hand. Such an empathetic awareness lies at the heart of aesthetic appreciation.

Humor is my default mode.

I was raised in the Depression, when there was a great sense of dog-eat-dog and people fighting over scraps.

There's something very reassuring... about the written record.

My attempt has been really to, beyond making a record of contemporary life, which is what you inevitably do, is trying to make beautiful books - books that are in some way beautiful, that are models of how to use the language, models of honest feeling, models of care.

America is beyond power; it acts as in a dream, as a face of God. Wherever America is, there is freedom, and wherever America is not, madness rules with chains, darkness strangles millions. Beneath her patient bombers, paradise is possible.

For many years, I read mystery novels for relaxation. But my tastes were too narrow - and, having read all of Agatha Christie and John Dickson Carr, I discovered that the implausibility and the thinness of the people distracted me unduly from the plot.

Art is like baby shoes. When you coat them with gold, they can no longer be worn.

As movers and the moved both know, books are heavy freight, the weight of refrigerators and sofas broken up into cardboard boxes. They make us think twice about changing addresses.

I know more about what it's like to be elderly and infirm and kind of stupid, the way you get forgetful, but on the other hand I'm a littler, wiser, dare we say? The word 'wisdom' has kind of faded out of our vocabulary, but yeah, I'm a little wiser.

I don't write about too many male businessmen, and I'm not apt to write about too many female businessmen.

A lot of the Koran does not speak very eloquently to a Westerner. Much of it is either legalistic or opaquely poetic.