The artist brings something into the world that didn't exist before, and he does it without destroying something else.

Museums and bookstores should feel, I think, like vacant lots - places where the demands on us are our own demands, where the spirit can find exercise in unsupervised play.

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.

Fiction is nothing less than the subtlest instrument for self-examination and self-display that Mankind has invented yet.

Being on TV is like being alive, only more so.

The world keeps ending but new people too dumb to know it keep showing up as if the fun's just started.

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.