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

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

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.