"We do survive every moment, after all, except the last one."
"Americans have been conditioned to respect newness, whatever it costs them."
"Any activity becomes creative when the doer cares about doing it right or better."
"What art offers is space - a certain breathing room for the spirit."
"Golf appeals to the idiot in us and the child. Just how childlike golf players become is proven by their frequent inability to count past five."
"Four years was enough of Harvard. I still had a lot to learn, but had been given the liberating notion that now I could teach myself."
"A healthy male adult bore consumes each year one and a half times his own weight in other people's patience."
"From infancy on, we are all spies; the shame is not this but that the secrets to be discovered are so paltry and few."
"We take our bearings, daily, from others. To be sane is, to a great extent, to be sociable."
"When I write, I aim in my mind not toward New York but toward a vague spot a little to the east of Kansas."
"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."
"Writers may be disreputable, incorrigible, early to decay or late to bloom but they dare to go it alone."
"Inspiration arrives as a packet of material to be delivered."
"Until the 20th century it was generally assumed that a writer had said what he had to say in his works."
"There's a crystallization that goes on in a poem which the young man can bring off, but which the middle-aged man can't."
"The inner spaces that a good story lets us enter are the old apartments of religion."
"A narrative is like a room on whose walls a number of false doors have been painted; while within the narrative, we have many apparent choices of exit, but when the author leads us to one particular door, we know it is the right one because it opens."
"But for a few phrases from his letters and an odd line or two of his verse, the poet walks gagged through his own biography."
"Most of American life consists of driving somewhere and then returning home, wondering why the hell you went."
"Dreams come true; without that possibility, nature would not incite us to have them."
"Rain is grace; rain is the sky descending to the earth; without rain, there would be no life."
"America is a vast conspiracy to make you happy."
"The refusal to rest content, the willingness to risk excess on behalf of one's obsessions, is what distinguishes artists from entertainers, and what makes some artists adventurers on behalf of us all."
"Art is like baby shoes. When you coat them with gold, they can no longer be worn."
"Sex is like money; only too much is enough."
