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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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

Humor is my default mode.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

Belief, like love, must be voluntary.

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

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.

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