The author: an imaginary person who writes real books.
I, too, believe in fidelity. But how can I be true to one woman without being false to all the others?
I have written much about many good places. But the best places of all, I have never mentioned.
Going to bed with Gertrude Stein, Jeane Kirkpatrick, Susan Sontag, or Margaret Thatcher: There are some things one prefers neither to do nor to have done.
Football is a game for trained apes. That, in fact, is what most of the players are – retarded gorillas wearing helmets and uniforms. The only thing more debased is the surrounding mob of drunken monkeys howling the gorillas on.
Girls: I never wanted them all. Just all the ones I wanted.
Women: We cannot love them all. But we must try.
I’ve wrecked and ravaged half my life in the pursuit of women, and I suffer the pangs of about seventeen regrets – the seventeen who got away.
The critics say that Shostakovich’s Fourth Symphony has no form. They are wrong; it has the form of Shostakovich’s Fourth Symphony.
As Mark Twain said, ‘I love Wagner – if only they’d cut out all that damned singing!’
In marriage, the occasional catastrophic crisis is easier to manage than the daily routine.
Great art is indefinable but that’s all right; it exists anyway.
Most of what we call the classics of world literature suggest artifacts in a wax museum. We have to hire and pay professors to get them read and talked about.
It is the difference between men and women, not the sameness, that creates the tension and the delight.
The feminists have a legitimate grievance. But so does everyone else.
A world without huge regions of total wilderness would be a cage; a world without lions and tigers and vultures and snakes and elk and bison would be – will be – a human zoo. A high-tech slum.
Mexico: where life is cheap, death is rich, and the buzzards are never unhappy.
There is a fine art to making enemies and it requires diligent cultivation. It’s not as easy as it looks.
Too many American authors have a servile streak where their backbone should be. Where’s our latest Nobel laureate? More than likely you’ll find him in the Rose Garden kissing the First Lady’s foot.
In art as in life, form and subject, body and soul, are one.