On winning the Pulitzer Prize while living in Brazil: “There was one vegetable man we always went to. And he said, ‘You know, it's amazing! Last week Señora (Somebody) took a chance on a bicycle and she won! My customers are so lucky!’”
“The only way I could finish a book and get a plot was just to keep making it longer until something happens.”
“The short story seems to me the most difficult and disciplining form of prose writing extant.”
“Politics is like navigation in a sea without charts, and wise men live the lives of pilgrims.”
“The present is always unsettled, no one has had time to contemplate it in tranquillity.”
“‘Do you consciously dream?’ One doesn’t know very much about these processes at all.”
“I couldn’t apply the word ‘intention’ positively to any of my poems. Or to any poem.”
“The American novel is … a conquest of the frontier; as it describes our experience, it creates it.”
“Don’t bother just to be better than your contemporaries or predecessors. Be better than yourself.”
“I have always found writing pleasant and don’t understand what people mean by ‘throes of creation.’”
“The miracle is that a work of art should live in the person who reads it.”
“For a writer to spend much of his time in the company of authors is, you know, a form of masturbation.”
From things that have happened and from things as they exist and from all things that you know and all those you cannot know, you make something through your invention that is not a representation but a whole new thing truer than anything true and alive, and you make it alive, and if you make it well enough, you give it immortality. That is why you write and for no other reason that you know of. But what about all the reasons that no one knows?
“I declare to all young men trying to become writers that they do not actually have to become drunkards first.”
“Sartre expressed the despair of this generation. He did not create it, but he gave it a justification and a style.”
“A writer survives in spite of his beliefs. Lawrence will be read whatever one thinks of his notions on sex. Dante is read in the Soviet Union.”
“I still maintain that living with somebody you know him as well as he can be known. What happens if you’re torturing him or he’s dying of cancer is no business of mine and that is not the individual.”
“Gertrude Stein did us the most harm when she said, ‘You’re all a lost generation.’ That got around to certain people and we all said, ‘Whee! We’re lost.’”
“I recognize limitations in the sense that I’ve read Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky and Shakespeare … Aside from that I don’t think of limiting myself.”
On the New York theater audience: “I have a fine play in mind I’ll write for them someday. The curtain slides up on a stage bare except for a machine gun facing the audience, then the actor walks upstage, adjusts the machine gun, and blasts them.”
“The fact is that we are I don’t know how many millions of people, yet communication, complete communication, is completely impossible between two of those people.”
On when he writes: “I like to stay up late at night and get drunk and sleep late. The afternoon is the only time I have left. ”
“When I did the cartoon originally I meant the naked woman to be at the top of a flight of stairs, but I lost the sense of perspective and there she was stuck up there, naked, on a bookcase.”
“America is stuck with its self-definition put on paper in 1776, and that was just like putting a burr under the metaphysical saddle of America.”
On fighting against didactic intentions: “I’ve spent a large part of my life trying to sit on it, to keep it down … I think the struggle with it may have brought a certain kind of objectivity into my work.”
“I don’t think it’s the novelist's job to give answers. He’s only concerned with exposing the human situation, and if his books do good incidentally that’s all well and good.”