The writer must face the fact that ordinary lives are what most people live most of the time, and that the novel as a narration of the fantastic and the adventurous is really an escapist plot; that aesthetically, the ordinary, the banal, is what you must deal with.
An affair wants to spill, to share its glory with the world. No act is so private it does not seek applause.
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.
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.
Without books, we might just melt into the airwaves and be just another set of blips.
Publishers are looking for blockbusters - all the world loves a megaseller.
There's almost nothing worse to live with than a struggling artist.
It is in middles that extremes clash, where ambiguity restlessly rules.
Most of American life consists of driving somewhere and then returning home, wondering why the hell you went.
I was an only child. I needed an alternative to family life - to real life, you could almost say - and cartoons, pictures in a book, the animated movies, seemed to provide it.
For whatever crispness and animation my writing has I give some credit to the cartoonist manque.
My first ambition was to be an animator for Walt Disney. Then I wanted to be a magazine cartoonist.
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.
There is a great deal of busywork to a writer's life, as to a professor's life, a great deal of work that matters only in that, if you don't do it, your desk becomes very full of papers. So, there is a lot of letter answering and a certain amount of speaking, though I try to keep that at a minimum.
The inner spaces that a good story lets us enter are the old apartments of religion.
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.
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.
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.
The lust to meet authors ranks low, I think, on the roll of holy appetites; but it is an authentic pang.
Being naked approaches being revolutionary; going barefoot is mere populism.
