For misery don't blame God. He gives the food but we cook it.

The whole history of baseball has the quality of mythology.

I am somewhat of a meliorist. That is to say, I act as an optimist because I find I cannot act at all, as a pessimist. One often feels helpless in the face of the confusion of these times, such a mass of apparently uncontrollable events and experiences to live through, attempt to understand, and if at all possible, give order to; but one must not withdraw from the task if he has some small things to offer - he does so at the risk of diminishing his humanity.

I write a book at least three times-once to understand it, the second time to improve the prose, and a third to compel it to say what it still must say.

We're persecuted in the most civilized languages.

Somewhere I put it this way: first drafts are for learning what one’s fiction wants him to say. Revision works with that knowledge to enlarge and enhance an idea, to reform it. Revision is one of the exquisite pleasures of writing.

Writing is a mode of being. If I write I live.