My generation was maybe the last in which you could set up shop as a writer and hope to make a living at it.
— John Updike
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.
New York, like the Soviet Union, has this universal usefulness: It makes you glad you live elsewhere.
New York is, of course, many cities, and an exile does not return to the one he left.
A seventeenth-century house can be recognized by its steep roof, massive central chimney and utter porchlessness. Some of those houses have a second-story overhang, emphasizing their medieval look.
For some of us, books are intrinsic to our sense of personal identity.
Bookstores are lonely forts, spilling light onto the sidewalk. They civilize their neighborhoods.
In tennis, there is the forehand, the backhand, the overhead smash and the drop volley, all with a different grip.
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.
The firmest house in my fiction, probably, is the little thick-walled sandstone farmhouse of 'The Centaur' and 'Of the Farm'; I had lived in that house, and can visualize every floorboard and bit of worn molding.
Imagine writing a poem with a sweating, worried-looking boy handing you a different pencil at the end of every word. My golf, you may say, is no poem; nevertheless, I keep wanting it to be one.
Somehow, it is hard to dislike a man once you have played a round of golf with him.
For whatever crispness and animation my writing has I give some credit to the cartoonist manque.
A Christian novelist tries to describe the world as it is.
In a city like New York, you're aware of the rich and poor.
Gods don't answer letters.
My attempt has been really to, beyond making a record of contemporary life, which is what you inevitably do, is trying to make beautiful books - books that are in some way beautiful, that are models of how to use the language, models of honest feeling, models of care.
Publishers are looking for blockbusters - all the world loves a megaseller.
There's something very reassuring... about the written record.
My complaint, as an exile who once loved New York and who likes to return a half-dozen times a year, is not that it plays host to extremes of the human condition: There is grandeur in that, and necessity.
Reminiscence and self-parody are part of remaining true to oneself.
Most Americans haven't had my happy experience of living for thirteen years in a seventeenth-century house, since most of America lacks seventeenth-century houses.
In my first 15 or 20 years of authorship, I was almost never asked to give a speech or an interview. The written work was supposed to speak for itself, and to sell itself, sometimes even without the author's photograph on the back flap.
Golf at its measured pace permits an electric excess of mental activity.
Tiger Woods did not always win majors with ease; after his narrow victory in the 1999 PGA, he slumped and sighed as if he'd been carrying rocks uphill all afternoon.
The dwelling places of Europe have an air of inheritance, or cumulative possession - a hive occupied by generations of bees.
By the mid-17th century, telescopes had improved enough to make visible the seasonally growing and shrinking polar ice caps on Mars, and features such as Syrtis Major, a dark patch thought to be a shallow sea.
My golf is so delicate, so tenuously wired together with silent inward prayers, exhortations and unstable visualizations, that the sheer pressure of an additional pair of eyes crumbles the whole rickety structure into rubble.
The study of literature threatens to become a kind of paleontology of failure, and criticism a supercilious psychoanalysis of authors.
I see no intrinsic reason why a doubly talented artist might not arise and create a comic-strip novel masterpiece.
It's sort of good to see your vocation as a daily task and have fairly modest expectations for financial or reward in other coin - glory, love, whatever.
I don't know; I think I'd be gloomy without some faith that there is a purpose and there is a kind of witness to my life.
America is beyond power; it acts as in a dream, as a face of God. Wherever America is, there is freedom, and wherever America is not, madness rules with chains, darkness strangles millions. Beneath her patient bombers, paradise is possible.
Does fiction, artistic writing, have much of a future? I must say it's on the way out.
I like short stories.
I think you remember certain phrases from bad reviews. You don't remember all the bad reviews.
New York is a city with virtually no habitable public space - only private spaces expensively maintained within the general disaster.
A seventeenth-century house tends to be short on frills like hallways and closets; you must improvise.
It's so hard to make a good tee shot after a birdie.
When I went away to college, I marveled at the wealth of bookstores around Harvard Square.
Baseball skills schizophrenically encompass a pitcher's, a batter's and a fielder's.
I'm a dull person.
The substance of fictional architecture is not bricks and mortar but evanescent consciousness.
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.
Golf's ultimate moral instruction directs us to find within ourselves a pivotal center of enjoyment: relax into a rhythm that fits the hills and swales, and play the shot at hand - not the last one, or the next one, but the one at your feet, in the poison ivy, where you put it.
Authors should be honored only for their works.
For a long time, I was under the impression that 'Terry and the Pirates' was the best comic strip in the United States.
The rich - they just live in another realm, really.
My father taught only math.
Sometimes it seems the whole purpose of pets is to bring death into the house.
