It seems to me the book has not just aesthetic values - the charming little clothy box of the thing, the smell of the glue, even the print, which has its own beauty. But there's something about the sensation of ink on paper that is in some sense a thing, a phenomenon rather than an epiphenomenon. I can't break the association of electric trash with the computer screen. Words on the screen give the sense of being just another passing electronic wriggle.

The inner spaces that a good story lets us enter are the old apartments of religion.

Government money in the arts, I fear, can only deflect artists from their responsibility to find an authentic market for their products.

Writing and rewriting are a constant search for what it is one is saying.

When I write, I aim in my mind not toward New York but to a vague spot a little to the east of Kansas. I think of the books on library shelves, without their jackets, years old, and a countryish teen-aged boy finding them, and having them speak to him. The review, the stacks in Brentano's, are just hurdles to get over, to place the books on that shelf.

Art imitates Nature in this; not to dare is to dwindle.

Celebrity is a mask that eats into the face.