“There comes a time in a man’s life when to get where he has to go – if there are no doors or windows he walks through a wall.”

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.

If you’re changing diapers and going to the playground, any ambitions of being a cool guy have to fly out the window.

Unhappiness comes from mirrors. Happiness comes from windows.

It’s a fact of earthly life that when God opens the windows of heaven to bless us, the devil opens the doors of hell to blast us.

You’ve tried to reform what will not learn. Shut doors on traits that you wish were dead; They will open a window and return.

When you start getting into a full-band, democratic context the little things almost immediately get thrown out the window because you don’t think they’re important.

What do you think leads us to the windows in the first place?

The biggest moment of flexibility in our shopping habits is when we have a child, because when you think about it, all of your old routines sort of go out the window, and suddenly a marketer can come in and sell you new kinds of things.

The mind is like the wind. You’re trying to stop the wind, dressed as a kite. How are you going to do it?