“It was all those biographies in me yelling, ‘We want out. We want to tell you what we’ve done to you.’”

There is in the darkness a unity, if you will, that cannot be achieved in any other environment, a blending of self with what the self perceives, and exquisite mystical experience.

Writing is a mode of being. If I write I live.

In my dreams I ate and I ate my dreams.

Prufrock had measured out his life with measuring spoons; Dubin, in books resurrecting the lives of others.

For misery don’t blame God. He gives the food but we cook it.

Tomorrow the world is not the same as today, though God listens with the same ear.

Nationality isn’t soul.

A man is an island in the only sense that matters, not an easy way to be. We live in mystery, a cosmos of separate lonely bodies, men, insects, stars. It is all loneliness and men know it best.

First drafts are for learning what your novel or story is about. Revision is working with that knowledge to enlarge and enhance an idea, to re-form it….

The whole history of baseball has the quality of mythology.

Ithink Isaid’All menare Jews excepttheydon’t know it.’I doubt I expected anyone to take the statement literally. But I think it’s an understandable statement and a metaphoric way of indicating how history, sooner or later, treats all men.

Somewhere I put it this way: first drafts are for learning what one’s fiction wants him to say. Revision works with that knowledge to enlarge and enhance an idea, to reform it. Revision is one of the exquisite pleasures of writing.

The past exudes legend: one can’t make pure clay of time’s mud.

I work with language. I love the flowers of afterthought.

We have two lives, the life we learn with and the life we live with after that. Suffering is what brings us toward happiness.

There are no wrong books. What’s wrong is the fear of them.

However you disguise novels, they are always biographies.

Read no history: nothing but biography, for that is life without theory.

So as not to disturb me in my little nook behind the biography shelves.

I very rarely read any fiction. I love biographies; I read about all kinds of people.

A singer’s biographical film should have their music and their voice.

Whatever is unnamed, undepicted in images, whatever is omitted from biography, censored in collections of letters, whatever is misnamed as something else.

[George] Uhlenbeck was a highly gifted physicist. One of his remarkable traits was he would read every issue of T%he Physical Review from cover to cover.

My father loved biographies. He loved the true tales of interesting people that were shaping our culture. I get why he dug Vanity Fair. You feel smarter, somehow, for reading it.