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A writer takes earnest measures to secure his solitude and then finds endless ways to squander it.

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When I work, I'm just translating the world around me in what seems to be straightforward terms. For my readers, this is sometimes a vision that's not...more

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Doesn't seem quite real. It's not meaningful. I can't quite imagine myself being 73. That's the age my father was! [Laughter.] How can I be his age? I...more

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Writing is a concentrated form of thinking...a young writer sees that with words he can place himself more clearly into the world. Words on a page, th...more

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I was too much of a Bronx kid to read Emerson or Hawthorne.

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Too young for Korea, too old for Vietnam.

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And you can glance out the window for a moment, distracted by the sound of small kids playing a made-up game in a neighbor's yard, some kind of kickba...more

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It was only after two years' work that it occurred to me that I was a writer. I had no particular expectation that the novel would ever be published, ...more

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Time and death: It's the ultimate vision of an artist at the end of everything. It's just what's there. It was not something I planned to do.

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I drove all night, northeast, and once again I felt it was literature I had been confronting these past days, the archetypes of the dismal mystery, so...more

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The letters released something, maybe a sense that he was not alone, that the world was a place where travelers in language could know the same things...more

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The true life is not reducible to words spoken or written, not by anyone, ever.

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Cities were built to measure time, to remove time from nature. There’s an endless counting down, he said. When you strip away all the surfaces, when y...more

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All plots tend to move deathward. This is the nature of plots. Political plots, terrorist plots, lovers’ plots, narrative plots, plots that are part o...more