Writers may be disreputable, incorrigible, early to decay or late to bloom but they dare to go it alone.
You do things and do things and nobody really has a clue.
So, you know, I think any life has in it enough material, enough points of departure, to fuel a writer’s career and that we shouldn’t worry about what we’re not but to try to focus on what we are and what we do know.
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.
We do survive every moment, after all, except the last one.
Four years was enough of Harvard. I still had a lot to learn, but had been given the liberating notion that now I could teach myself.
We are most alive when we’re in love.
The refusal to rest content, the willingness to risk excess on behalf of one’s obsessions, is what distinguishes artists from entertainers, and what makes some artists adventurers on behalf of us all.
I think it’s the sentence-to-sentence pleasures, the little surprises of a surprising style of an acute style, and also the way things happen one after the other, that makes a book interesting to read page to page.
Children are not a zoo of entertainingly exotic creatures, but an array of mirrors in which the human predicament leaps out at us.
There is no doubt that I have lots of words inside me; but at moments, like rush-hour traffic at the mouth of a tunnel, they jam.
In memory’s telephoto lens, far objects are magnified.
The literary scene is a kind of Medusa’s raft, small and sinking, and one’s instinct when a newcomer tries to clamber aboard is to step on his fingers.
Wickedness was like food: once you got started it was hard to stop; the gut expanded to take in more and more.
Life is a nacho. It can be yummy-crunchy or squishy-yucky. It just depends on how long it takes for you to start eating it.
The golf swing is like a suitcase into which we are trying to pack one too many things.
What seems to sell books is good word-of-mouth, not promotion tours. I’m too old to believe that media promotion of a book really matters. What matters is how it will look 100 years from now, not how many copies are sold.
There is the fear that you somehow neglected to say what was really yours to say.
Smaller than a breadbox, bigger than a TV remote, the average book fits into the human hand with a seductive nestling, a kiss of texture, whether of cover cloth, glazed jacket, or flexible paperback.
It is not difficult to deceive the first time, for the deceived possesses no antibodies; unvaccinated by suspicion, she overlooks lateness, accepts absurd excuses, permits the flimsiest patching to repair great rents in the quotidian.