Facts are the images of history, just as images are the facts of fiction.
Longing, the hope for fulfillment, is the one unwavering passion of the world’s commerce.
I thought of myself as a writer for years before I got around to writing anything.
The philosophical conservative is someone willing to pay the price of other people s suffering for his principles.
Every major work of art is a transgression, but the artist is not necessarily, by nature, a transgressor.
It proposed that human beings, by the act of making witness, warranted times and places for their existence other than the time and place they were living through.
It may be that the most avid readers of new fiction in America today are film producers, an indication of the trouble were in.
All over the world today, not just in the totalitarian countries, assiduous functionaries in Ministries of Truth are clubbing history dumb and rendering language insensible.
I lived in New York for a couple months. It seemed to me at first an incredibly clean place with well-dressed people and washed cars and bright-painted red-and-yellow streetcars and white buildings.
Children have a lot more to worry about from the parents who raised them than from the books they read.
One of the things I had to learn as a writer was to trust the act of writing. To put myself in the position of writing to find out what I was writing. I did that with ‘World’s Fair’ as with all of them. The inventions of the book come as discoveries.
I have been everywhere because I don’t know what I’m looking for.
Writing a novel is like driving a car at night. Sometimes you run over a drunk who’s lain down and fallen asleep on the warm pavement. I mean, do you keep going, or what?
We are able to walk on air, but only as long as our illusion supports us.
One of the things I had to learn as a writer was to trust the act of writing.
A book begins as a private excitement of the mind.
Congress is so beholden to the money that any solution in the general interest will be frustrated and subverted by the corporate interests who feel they will be damaged by progress, fair play and justice.
I worry about images. Images are what things mean.
If you feel a bump on page one hundred, it may be you went off on page fifty.
I’ve always felt, as a writer, that radicals are fascinating because they’re relations, they have a place in the American family. They’re the relatives everyone wishes would go away. They’re the embarrassments to decorum and good taste.