There should always be something gratuitous about art, just as there seems to be, according to the new-wave cosmologists, something gratuitous about the universe.

I think you remember certain phrases from bad reviews. You don't remember all the bad reviews.

My generation was maybe the last in which you could set up shop as a writer and hope to make a living at it.

I think my first story sold for $550. This was in 1954, and it seemed like quite a lot of money, and I said to myself, 'Hey, I'm a professional writer now.'

Until the 20th century it was generally assumed that a writer had said what he had to say in his works.

Without books, we might just melt into the airwaves and be just another set of blips.

A seventeenth-century house can be recognized by its steep roof, massive central chimney and utter porchlessness. Some of those houses have a second-story overhang, emphasizing their medieval look.

The reader knows the writer better than he knows himself; but the writer's physical presence is light from a star that has moved on.

I'm a dull person.

I think books should have secrets, like people do.

Baseball skills schizophrenically encompass a pitcher's, a batter's and a fielder's.

I never really made a choice to live in America, so I should be aware of the social strata outside of the ones that I may live in.

Memory has a spottiness, as if the film was sprinkled with developer instead of immersed in it.

A room containing Philip Roth, I have noticed, begins hilariously to whirl and pulse with a mix of rebelliousness and constriction that I take to be Oedipal.

The good ending dismisses us with a touch of ceremony and throws a backward light of significance over the story just read. It makes it, as they say, or unmakes it. A weak beginning is forgettable, but the end of a story bulks in the reader's mind like the giant foot in a foreshortened photograph.

The rich - they just live in another realm, really.

There's a crystallization that goes on in a poem which the young man can bring off, but which the middle-aged man can't.

To guarantee the individual maximum freedom within a social frame of minimal laws ensures - if not happiness - its hopeful pursuit.

Authors should be honored only for their works.

There is no pleasing New Englanders, my dear, their soil is all rocks and their hearts are bloodless absolutes.

I find screenplays easy to write, my novels being very visual. You see what people look like. The physical action is described.

I lived five years in the Midwest, and I loved it. The people were so nice. The people were so open.

I never wanted my kids to feel I was more interested in anything I was doing than I was in them.

There's a lot of ignorance about how long it takes to write a novel. There's a lot of ignorance about how long a novel is in your head before you start to write it.