A healthy male adult bore consumes each year one and a half times his own weight in other people's patience.

Americans have been conditioned to respect newness, whatever it costs them.

Every marriage tends to consist of an aristocrat and a peasant. Of a teacher and a learner.

Dreams come true; without that possibility, nature would not incite us to have them.

Art is like baby shoes. When you coat them with gold, they can no longer be worn.

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

Sex is like money; only too much is enough.

We are most alive when we're in love.

Writing criticism is to writing fiction and poetry as hugging the shore is to sailing in the open sea.

The Founding Fathers in their wisdom decided that children were an unnatural strain on parents. So they provided jails called schools, equipped with tortures called an education.

Rain is grace; rain is the sky descending to the earth; without rain, there would be no life.

That a marriage ends is less than ideal; but all things end under heaven, and if temporality is held to be invalidating, then nothing real succeeds.

The substance of fictional architecture is not bricks and mortar but evanescent consciousness.

Now that I am sixty, I see why the idea of elder wisdom has passed from currency.

To be a human being is to be in a state of tension between your appetites and your dreams, and the social realities around you and your obligations to your fellow man.

Professionalism in art has this difficulty: To be professional is to be dependable, to be dependable is to be predictable, and predictability is esthetically boring - an anti-virtue in a field where we hope to be astonished and startled and at some deep level refreshed.

Every marriage tends to consist of an aristocrat and a peasant. Of a teacher and a learner.

Each morning my characters greet me with misty faces willing, though chilled, to muster for another day's progress through the dazzling quicksand the marsh of blank paper.