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.
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.
A writer of books has to admit that film is the enemy, and that in my case I have been sleeping with the enemy.
We make a mistake to condescend to the past as if it were preparatory to our own time.
Poems have ideas. The ideas of poems come out of their emotions and their emotions are carried on images.
There is no longer any such thing as fiction or nonfiction; there’s only narrative.
I’ve known several cases of writers who decide to write about something and they research the hell out of it and when they’re ready to write, they can’t move because they are so burdened. I start writing. Whatever I need somehow comes to hand.
It was evident to him that the world composed and recomposed itself constantly in an endless process of dissatisfaction.
Time seems to me a drift, a shifting of sand. And my mind is shifting with it. I am wearing away.
Stories distribute the suffering so that it can be borne.