“I love staying in written correspondence with some writers. That’s enough for me.”

In a world without future, each parting of friends is a death. In a world without future, each loneliness is final.

The book is finished by the reader. A good novel should invite the reader in and let the reader participate in the creative experience and bring their own life experiences to it, interpret with their own individual life experiences.

Unconditional love. That’s what he wants to give her and what he wants from her. People should give without wanting anything in return.

“Then there are those who think their bodies don’t exist. They live by mechanical time. They rise at seven o’clock in the morning. They eat their lunch at noon and their supper at six. They arrive at their appointments on time, precisely by the clock.

Writers read essays and serious thinkers and serious readers… that is a small population.

Order is the law of nature, the universal trend, the cosmic direction. If time is an arrow, that arrow points toward order.

There are important differences which should be preserved, and in trying to do away with those differences we would lose something the same way as if we tried to make all religions one religion or all races one race.

It is true that the arts at MIT don’t have the same amount of funding or same status as the sciences or engineering.

Sadness is no more than a bit of acid transfixed in the cerebellum.

In this world, there are two times. There is mechanical time and there is body time.

If you over-plot your book you strangle your characters. Your characters have to have enough freedom and life to be able to surprise you.

Thoughts are no more than electrical surges in the brain.

I’ve taken a philosophical position on e-mail. Although I think it’s a wonderful communication technology, and it has a lot of good uses, it is abused quite a lot.

I was in New York and had lunch with Oliver Sachs and compared notes with him – he is someone I really like.

I reached for some principle that had been subconscious in me and lifted it into consciousness.

Writers are a loosely knit community – community is an overstated word. Writers don’t see each other very much.

And the correspondence between them that we have, I mean, she says, “I cannot believe you’re not going to say one word.” And she writes to Walter White, “I’ve asked FDR to say one word. Perhaps he will.” But he doesn’t. And these become very bitter disagreements.

His name never occurs in a single inscription, and it is never found in a single piece of private correspondence. Zero! Zip references!

No public character has ever stood the revelation of private utterance and correspondence.

1992 is not a year I shall look back on with undiluted pleasure. In the words of one of my more sympathetic correspondents, it hasturned out to be an Annus Horribilis.

I value my correspondence with writers…

When I came back to Washington to be The Times’ chief congressional correspondent in 1991, I was looking for a book subject, and Ted Kennedy stood out for two reasons.