In conversation you can use timing, a look, an inflection. But on the page all you have is commas, dashes, the amount of syllables in a word. When I write, I read everything out loud to get the right rhythm.
If people don’t want to listen to you, what makes you think they want to hear from your sweater?
Cold soup is a very tricky thing and it is a rare hostess who can carry it off. More often than not the dinner guest is left with the impression that had he only come a little earlier he could have gotten it while it was still hot.
Citizen’s Band radio renders one accessible to a wide variety of people from all walks of life. It should not be forgotten that all walks of life include conceptual artists, dry cleaners, and living poets.
There’s too much democracy in the culture, not enough in the society.
I walk a lot in New York, not for the exercise but to get from place to place, and because it’s the way of having the least contact with human beings.
Frenchman: Germans with good food.
New York was always more expensive than the other places, even when it was going bankrupt. In other words, in 1971, New York was expensive for someone with no money. For anyone.
Television turned out to be exactly as bad as the most irritating and pedantic intellectuals of the ’50s said it was going to be.
Generally speaking, it is inhumane to detain a fleeting insight.
Writers get exactly the right amount of fame: just enough to get a good table in a restaurant but not enough so that people are constantly interrupting you while you’re eating dinner.
Communism requires of its adherents that they arise early and participate in a strenuous round of calisthenics. To someone who wishes that cigarettes came already lit the thought of such exertion at an hour when decent people are just nodding off is thoroughly abhorrent.
Your responsibility as a parent is never great as the case is with the mother.
I never wanted to have any extra money, if it meant having to have any extra work.
Writing pornography is deadly, nothing duller. I mean a toll-taker has a more exciting life than a pornographer.
Whenever I am doing anything else, which is most of the time, even if it is not something like robbing a bank, I feel felonious. Writing is what I’m supposed to be doing.
I have a hard time writing. Most writers have a hard time writing. I have a harder time than most because I’m lazier than most. I don’t want to brag, but I’m the laziest person I have ever known.
Writing is so hard. Why would you be a writer if you weren’t really good at it? If you could be anything else, why would you be a writer?
Most writers write too much. I have the exact opposite problem. I feel I could write almost anything in a paragraph. I have a natural ability to condense, and so I often think, “Are you kidding me? Five thousand words? How am I gonna make 5,000 words out of that?”
Whenever someone accuses someone of being a racist – which is rare, you have to admit, considering how much racism there is – there is an incredible outrage. I realized that we live in an environment that it seems to be worse to call someone a racist than to be one.
I’m not a Communist. I’m an American. I’m a capitalist. I mean, I’m not a very good capitalist, myself. I’m not very good at it, but it’s not that I’m not for capitalism. But people who believe in things like corporate citizenship, it’s idiotic. I mean, it shows you’re an idiot.