Arabic is very twisting, very beautiful. The call to prayer is quite haunting; it almost makes you a believer on the spot.
The essential support and encouragement comes from within, arising out of the mad notion that your society needs to know what only you can tell it.
Every marriage tends to consist of an aristocrat and a peasant. Of a teacher and a learner.
All cartoonists are geniuses, but Arnold Roth is especially so.
Until the 20th century it was generally assumed that a writer had said what he had to say in his works.
Professionalism in art has this difficulty: To be professional is to be dependable, to be dependable is to be predictable, and predictability is esthetically boring - an anti-virtue in a field where we hope to be astonished and startled and at some deep level refreshed.
My last vivid boyhood fright from books came when I was 15; I was visiting my uncle and aunt in Greenwich, and, emboldened by my success with 'The Waste Land,' I opened their copy of 'Ulysses.' The whiff of death off those remorseless, closely written pages overpowered me. So: back to soluble mysteries, and jokes that were not cosmic.
In my first 15 or 20 years of authorship, I was almost never asked to give a speech or an interview. The written work was supposed to speak for itself, and to sell itself, sometimes even without the author's photograph on the back flap.
Baseball skills schizophrenically encompass a pitcher's, a batter's and a fielder's.
The writers we tend to universally admire, like Beckett, or Kafka, or TS Eliot, are not very prolific.
The dwelling places of Europe have an air of inheritance, or cumulative possession - a hive occupied by generations of bees.
Government is either organized benevolence or organized madness; its peculiar magnitude permits no shading.
Truth should not be forced; it should simply manifest itself, like a woman who has in her privacy reflected and coolly decided to bestow herself upon a certain man.
The cinema has done more for my spiritual life than the church. My ideas of fame, success and beauty all originate from the big screen. Whereas Christian religion is retreating everywhere and losing more and more influence; film has filled the vacuum and supports us with myths and action-controlling images.
Billy Collins writes lovely poems. Limpid, gently and consistently startling, more serious than they seem, they describe all the worlds that are and were and some others besides.
Eros is everywhere. It is what binds.
But for a few phrases from his letters and an odd line or two of his verse, the poet walks gagged through his own biography.
It's so hard to make a good tee shot after a birdie.
Each morning my characters greet me with misty faces willing, though chilled, to muster for another day's progress through the dazzling quicksand the marsh of blank paper.
Writers may be disreputable, incorrigible, early to decay or late to bloom but they dare to go it alone.
