Our artistic heroes tend to be those self-exercisers, like Picasso, and Nabokov, and Wallace Stevens, who rather defiantly kept playing past dark.
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.'
The study of literature threatens to become a kind of paleontology of failure, and criticism a supercilious psychoanalysis of authors.
We are drawn to artists who tell us that art is difficult to do and takes a spiritual effort, because we are still puritan enough to respect a strenuous spiritual effort.
There's something very reassuring... about the written record.
Reminiscence and self-parody are part of remaining true to oneself.
Young or old, a writer sends a book into the world, not himself.
I like short stories.
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.
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.
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.
I love Shillington not as one loves Capri or New York, because they are special, but as one loves one's own body and consciousness, because they are synonymous with being.
New York, like the Soviet Union, has this universal usefulness: It makes you glad you live elsewhere.
Belief, like love, must be voluntary.
Perhaps I have written fiction because everything unambiguously expressed seems somehow crass to me; and when the subject is myself, I want to jeer and weep.
What interests me is why men think of women as witches. It's because they're so fascinating and exasperating, so other.
