When I was a child... I was watching a snowstorm, and hopefully asked, 'Momma, do we believe in winter?'

A life of writing books is a trying adventure in which you cannot find out where you are unless you lose your way.

Nothing has a more sinister effect on art than the artist's desire to prove that he's good. The terrible temptation of idealism! You must achieve mastery over your idealism, over your virtue as well as over your vice, aesthetic mastery over everything that drives you to write in the first place - your outrage, your politics, your grief, your love!

And since we don’t just forget things because they don’t matter but also forget things because they matter too much because each of us remembers and forgets in a pattern whose labyrinthine windings are an identification mark no less distinctive than a fingerprintit’s no wonder that the shards of reality one person will cherish as a biography can seem to someone else who, say, happened to have eaten some ten thousand dinners at the very same kitchen table, to be a willful excursion into mythomania

Oh, to be a center fielder, a center fielder- and nothing more

I think I write or publish as much as I do because I can bear being without a book to work on.

For a pure sense of being tumultuously alive, you can't beat the nasty side of existence.