"Who'll hold families together, if everybody has to live? Living is a compromise, between doing what you want and doing what other people want."

"Oh,' she says, 'the Vat prints nothing but rapes. You know what a rape usually is? It's a woman who changed her mind afterward."

"If men do not keep on speaking terms with children, they cease to be men, and become merely machines for eating and for earning money."

"The study of literature threatens to become a kind of paleontology of failure, and criticism a supercilious psychoanalysis of authors."

"To be President of the United States, sir, is to act as advocate for a blind, venomous, and ungrateful client."

"The fullness ends when we give Nature her ransom, when we make children for her. Then she is through with us, and we become, first inside, and then outside, junk. Flower stalks."

"While some of us burned on the edges of life, insatiable and straining to see more deeply in, he sat complacently at the centre and let life come to him - so much of it, evidently, that he could not keep track of his appointments."

"Dollars had once gathered like autumn leaves on the wooden collection plates; dollars were the flourishing sign of God's specifically American favor, made manifest in the uncountable millions of Carnegie and Mellon and Henry Ford and Catholina Lambert. But amid this fabled plenty the whiff of damnation had cleared of dollars and cents the parched ground around Clarence Wilmot."

"Religion enables us to ignore nothingness and get on with the jobs of life."

"There is no doubt that I have lots of words inside me; but at moments, like rush-hour traffic at the mouth of a tunnel, they jam."

"The voice welling up out of this little man is terrific, Harry had noticed it at the house, but here, in the nearly empty church, echoing off the walnut knobs and memorial plaques and high arched rafters, beneath the tall central window of Jesus taking off into the sky with a pack of pastel apostles for a launching pad, the timbre is doubled, richer, with a rounded sorrowful something Rabbit hadn't noticed hitherto, gathering and pressing the straggle of guests into a congregation, subduing any fear that this ceremony might be a farce. Laugh at ministers all you want, they have the words we need to hear, the ones the dead have spoken."

"I must say, when I reread myself, it's the poetry I tend to look at. It's the most exciting to write, and it's over the quickest."

"He lost his appetite for reading. He was afraid of being overwhelmed again. In mystery novels people died like dolls being discarded; in science fiction enormities of space and time conspired to crush the humans ; and even in P.G. Wodehouse he felt a hollowness, a turning away from reality that was implicitly bitter, and became explicit in the comic figures of futile parsons."

"He doesn't blame people for many sins, but he does hate uncoordination, the root of all evil, as he feels it, for without coordination there can be no order, no connecting."

"Chinese food in Texas is the best Chinese food in the United States except Boston."

"Customs and convictions change; respectable people are the last to know, or to admit, the change, and the ones most offended by fresh reflections of the facts in the mirror of art."

"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."

"One does not go to Moscow to get fat."

"If you have the guts to be yourself, other people'll pay your price."

"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."

"It is easy to love people in memory the hard thing is to love them when they are there in front of you."

"We're past the age of heroes and hero kings... Most of our lives are basically mundane and dull, and it's up to the writer to find ways to make them interesting."

"In fiction, imaginary people become realer to us than any named celebrity glimpsed in a series of rumored events, whose causes and subtler ramifications must remain in the dark. An invented figure like Anna Karenina or Emma Bovary emerges fully into the light of understanding, which brings with it identification, sympathy and pity."

"Not only are selves conditional but they die. Each day, we wake slightly altered, and the person we were yesterday is dead. So why, one could say, be afraid of death, when death comes all the time?"

"But it is just two lovers, holding hands and in a hurry to reach their car, their locked hands a starfish leaping through the dark."

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

"The essential self is innocent, and when it tastes its own innocence knows that it lives for ever."

"Humor is my default mode."

"Any activity becomes creative when the doer cares about doing it right or better."

"By the time a partnership dissolves, it has dissolved."

"The Chinese food arrives. Delicious saliva fills his mouth. He really hasn't had any since Texas. He loves this food that contains no disgusting proofs of slain animals, a bloody slab of cow haunch, a hen's sinewy skeleton; these ghosts have been minced and destroyed and painlessly merged with the shapes of insensate vegetables, plump green bodies that invite his appetite's innocent gusto. Candy."

"Existence itself does not feel horrible; it feels like an ecstasy, rather, which we have only to be still to experience."

"One of the cool chaste countries - Canada or Sweden."

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

"The cinema has done more for my spiritual life than the church. My ideas of fame, success and beauty all originate from the big screen. Whereas Christian religion is retreating everywhere and losing more and more influence; film has filled the vacuum and supports us with myths and action-controlling images."

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

"Wickedness was like food: once you got started it was hard to stop, the gut expanded to take in more and more."

"Suspect each moment, for it is a thief, tiptoeing away with more than it brings."

"Perhaps we meet our heaven at the start and not the end of life."

"Women, fire in their crotch, won't burn out, begin by fighting off pricks, end by going wild hunting for one that still works."

"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."

"To guarantee the individual maximum freedom within a social frame of minimal laws ensures - if not happiness - its hopeful pursuit."

"The true New Yorker secretly believes that people living anywhere else have to be, in some sense, kidding."

"No act is so private it does not seek applause."

"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."

"The faith in an afterlife, however much our reason ridicules it, very modestly extends our faith that each moment of our consciousness will be followed by another - that a coherent matrix has been prepared for this precious self of ours. The guarantee that our self enjoys an intended relation to the outer world is most, if not all, of what we ask from religion. God is the self projected onto reality by our natural and necessary optimism. He is the not-me personified."

"We are most alive when we're in love."

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

"From infancy on, we are all spies; the shame is not this but that the secrets to be discovered are so paltry and few."