"They've not forgotten him: worse, they never heard of him."

"People go around mourning the death of God; it's the death of sssin that bothers me. Without ssin, people aren't people any more, they're just ssoul-less sheep."

"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."

"An affair wants to spill, to share its glory with the world. No act is so private it does not seek applause."

"America is a vast conspiracy to make you happy."

"In fact we do not try to picture the afterlife, nor is it our selves in our nervous tics and optical flecks that we wish to perpetuate; it is the self as the window on the world that we can't bear to thinkof shutting. My mind when I was a boy of ten or eleven sent up its silent scream at the thought of future aeons -- at the thought of the cosmic party going on without me. The yearning for an afterlife is the opposite of selfish: it is love and praise of the world that we are privileged, in this complex interval of light, to witness and experience."

"Children are not a zoo of entertainingly exotic creatures, but an array of mirrors in which the human predicament leaps out at us."

"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."

"She had willed herself open to him and knew that the chemistry of love was all within her, her doing. Even his power to wound her with neglect was a power she had created and granted ..."

"Growth is betrayal."

"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."

"We are cruel enough without meaning to be."

"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."

"Writers may be disreputable, incorrigible, early to decay or late to bloom but they dare to go it alone."

"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."

"On the single strand of wire strung to bring our house electricity, grackles and starlings neatly punctuated an invisible sentence."

"We must have sinned greatly, at some juncture long buried in our protozoic past, to deserve such a universe."

"In my own case at least I feel my professional need for freedom of speech and expression prejudices me toward a government whose constitution guarantees it."

"Driving is boring," Rabbit pontificates, "but it's what we do. Most of American life is driving somewhere and then driving back wondering why the hell you went."

"Being a divorcee in a small town is a little like playing Monopoly, eventually you land on all the properties."

"Creativity is merely a plus name for regular activity. Any activity becomes creative when the doer cares about doing it right, or better."

"Sex is like money; only too much is enough."

"The essential support and encouragement comes from within, arising out of the mad notion that your society needs to know what only you can tell it."

"The difficulty with humorists is that they will mix what they believe with what they don't-whichever seems likelier to win an effect."

"Momentarily drained of lust, he stares at the remembered contortions to which it has driven him. His life seems a sequence of grotesque poses assumed to no purpose, a magic dance empty of belief."

"Most of American life consists of driving somewhere and then returning home, wondering why the hell you went."

"There is no such thing as static happiness. Happiness is a mixed thing, a thing compounded of sacrifices, and losses, and betrayals."

"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."

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

"The dead teach this great lesson, which we are loathe to learn: we too will die."

"The mind cannot fall asleep as long as it watches itself. Only when the mind moves unwatched and becomes absorbed in images that tug it as it were to one side does self-consciousness dissolve and sleep with its healing, brilliantly detailed fictions pour in upon the jittery spirit. Falling asleep is a study in trust. Likewise, religion tries to put as ease with the world. Being human cannot be borne alone. We need other presences. We need soft night noises-a mother speaking downstairs. We need the little clicks and sighs of a sustaining otherness. We need the gods."

"The difficulty with humourists is that they will mix what they believe with what they don't whichever seems likelier to win an effect."

"I love my government not least for the extent to which it leaves me alone."

"Being naked approaches being revolutionary; going barefoot is mere populism."

"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."

"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."

"Lucas felt uncommonly depressed and careless. Drunkenness, in a man like August Hay, melts the restraints on cheerfulness. On the contrary with Lucas: he kept up courage consciously. Sap his mind, and the lid was lifted from a cesspool of muddy colors."

"In the purifying sweep of atheism human beings lost all special value. The numb misery of the horse was matched by that of the farmer; the once-green ferny lives crushed into coal's fossiliferous strata were no more anonymous and obliterated than Clarence's own life would soon be, in a wink of earth's tremendous time. Without Biblical blessing the physical universe became sherry horrible and disgusting. All fleshy acts became vile, rather than merely some. The reality of men slaying lambs and cattle, fish and fowl to sustain their own bodies took on an aspect of grisly comedy--the blood-soaked selfishness of a cosmic mayhem."

"Having children is something we think we ought to do because our parents did it, but when it is over the children are just other members of the human race, rather disappointingly."

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

"My first thought, as a child, was that the artist brings something into the world that didn't exist before, and that he does it without destroying something else. A kind of refutation of the conservation of matter. That still seems to me its central magic, its core of joy."

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

"No matter how cheerful and blameless the day's activities have been, when you wake in the middle of the night there is guilt in the air, a gnawing feeling of everything being slightly off, wrong - you in the wrong, and the world too, as if darkness is a kind of light that shows us the depth we are about to fall into."

"Mars has long exerted a pull on the human imagination. The erratically moving red star in the sky was seen as sinister or violent by the ancients: The Greeks identified it with Ares, the god of war; the Babylonians named it after Nergal, god of the underworld. To the ancient Chinese, it was Ying-huo, the fire planet."

"The thing about her is, she's good-natured. He knew it the second he saw her standing by the parking meters. He could just tell from the soft way her belly looked. With women, you keep bumping against them, because they want different things, they're a different race. Either they give, like a plant, or scrape, like a stone. In all the green world nothing feels as good as a woman's good nature."

"And yet does the appetite for new days ever really cease?"

"Suddenly summoned to witness something great and horrendous, we keep fighting not to reduce it to our own smallness."

"What art offers is space - a certain breathing room for the spirit."

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

"TV families and your own are hard to tell apart, except your isn't interrupted every six minutes by commercials and theirs don't get bogged down into nothingness, a state where nothing happens, no skit, no zany visitors, no outburst on the laugh track, nothing at all but boredom and a lost feeling, especially when you get up in the morning and the moon is still shining and men are making noisy bets on the first tee."