The writer isn’t made in a vacuum. Writers are witnesses. The reason we need writers is because we need witnesses to this terrifying century.
Anyone at any age is able to tell the story of his or her life with authority.
I am led to the proposition that there is no fiction or nonfiction as we commonly understand the distinction: there is only narrative.
And so do people pass out of one’s life and all you can remember of them is their humanity, a poor fitful thing of no dominion, like your own.
The images of things are not the things in themselves.
The poem is a cry of the unborn heart. Yes, because the poem perfectly embodies the world, there is no world without poem.
Communists have no respect for people, only for positions.
I try to avoid experience if I can. Most experience is bad.
I thought I would lose, so I didn’t prepare a speech.
The music of the Stones pounds the air like the amplified pulse of my erection.
And so the ordinary unendurable torments we all experienced were indeed exceptional in the way they were absorbed in each heart.
The Shadow had no imagination. He neither looked at naked women nor thought of ridding the world of dictators like Hitler or Mussolini.
When I’m writing, I like to seal everything off and face the wall, not to look outside the window. The only way out is through the sentences.
Writing is immensely difficult. The short forms especially.
The theory of the teacher with all these immigrant kids was that if you spoke English loudly enough they would eventually understand.
Movies are too literal.
A new reader shouldn’t be able to find you in your work, though someone who’s read more may begin to.
When you’re working well, you don’t do research. Whatever you need comes to you.
I did have a feeling then that the culture of factuality was so dominating that storytelling had lost all its authority.
Things that appear on the front page of the newspaper as ‘fact’ are far more dangerous than the games played by a novelist, and can lead to wars.
I have committed many sins in my life. This precise sin-the sin against poets-is without absolution.