Spoon the sauce over the ice cream. It will harden. This is what you have been working for.

Updike was the first to take the penile sensorium under the wing of elaborate metaphorical prose.

You need the art in order to love the life.

I'm a sucker for interiors and carefully, beautifully filmed people sitting in a big room. My appetites are simple.

There's something paralyzing about being a writer that you have to escape. I don't want to think of myself as a guy who's written a bunch of books. The 26 letters distance us from our own hesitations and they make us sound as if we know what we're doing. We know grammar, we know prose, but actually we're all just struggling in the dark, really.

There was a lot of maneuvering on the part of the Roosevelt administration to get the stars aligned so that that attack would happen. There's just no question about that; you don't even have to look at the decoding of diplomatic cables or anything else. FDR's own admiral thought it was a bad idea to have the fleet confined in one place way out in the middle of the Pacific.

I woke up thinking a very pleasant thought. There is lots left in the world to read.