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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Eros is everywhere. It is what binds.

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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