We are most alive when we're in love.

A house, having been willfully purchased and furnished, tells us more than a body, and its description is a foremost resource of the art of fiction.

I think taste is a social concept and not an artistic one. I'm willing to show good taste, if I can, in somebody else's living room, but our reading life is too short for a writer to be in any way polite. Since his words enter into another's brain in silence and intimacy, he should be as honest and explicit as we are with ourselves.

I like short stories.

We do survive every moment, after all, except the last one.

Chaos is God's body. Order is the Devil's chains.

Revolution is just one crowd taking power from another.

New York, like the Soviet Union, has this universal usefulness: It makes you glad you live elsewhere.

The rich -- they just live in another realm, really.

There is a great deal of busywork to a writer's life, as to a professor's life, a great deal of work that matters only in that, if you don't do it, your desk becomes very full of papers. So, there is a lot of letter answering and a certain amount of speaking, though I try to keep that at a minimum.

Bookstores are lonely forts, spilling light onto the sidewalk. They civilize their neighborhoods.

What I'm going to do is pry every stinking tag off these f.ing chairs and make a f.ing collar and throw that cat right in Connor's puked-up face. Pale turd.

The golf swing is like a suitcase into which we are trying to pack one too many things.

Fiction is very greedy. It will take all you know and then some. The first novel I tried to write, I was struck by this -- the appetite of the blank page for ever more information, ever more data. An empty book is a greedy thing. You are right: You wind up using everything you know, and often more than once.

My life is, in a sense, trash. My life is only that of which the residue is my writing.

I like old men. They can be wonderful bastards because they have nothing to lose. The only people who can be themselves are babies and old bastards.

All those little congruences and arabesques you prepared with such delicate anticipatory pleasure are gobbled up as if by pigs at a pastry cart.

For male and female alike, the bodies of the other sex are messages signaling what we must do they are glowing signifiers of our own necessities.

Critics are like pigs at the pastry cart.

A person believes various things at various times, even on the same day.