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

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.

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.

What suffering has taught me is the uselessness of suffering.

No matter where you are, you’re always a bit on your own, always an outsider.

Anything that inspires unselfishness makes for our ennoblement. Christmas does that. I am all for Christmas.

Oh, Satan! one and unique God of my soul, inspire thou in me something yet more, present further perversions to my smoking heart, and then shalt thou see how I shall plunge myself into them all!

So long as we have held fast to voluntary principles and have been actuated and inspired by the spirit of service.

I listen to music to when I’m feeling a certain way or to make myself feel a certain way. So why not make my own music inspired by true emotions?

He is the best physician who is the most ingenious inspirer of hope.

All tedious research is worth one inspired moment.

Just strengthening that theme that America is a place of opportunity and hoping to inspire people to fulfill those opportunities, and to want more, and to want better, and to see the places we can go. So many people identify with me because of the place that I come from.