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The writer is the person who stands outside society, independent of affiliation and independent of influence.
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I've always seen myself in sentences. I begin to recognize myself, word by word, as I work through a sentence.
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People will always make comparisons.
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There's a connection between the advances that are made in technology and the sense of primitive fear people develop in response to it.
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War is the ultimate realization of modern technology.
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Every sentence has a truth waiting at the end of it and the writer learns how to know it when he finally gets there.
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I've come to think of Europe as a hardcover book, America as the paperback version.
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I think more than writers, the major influences on me have been European movies, jazz, and Abstract Expressionism.
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I think fiction comes from everything you've ever done, and said, and dreamed, and imagined. It comes from everything you've read and haven't read...I think my work comes out of the culture of the world around me. I think that's where my language comes from.
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Californians invented the concept of life-style. This alone warrants their doom.
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I slept for four years. I didn't study much of anything. I majored in something called communication arts.
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I'm a novelist, period. An American novelist.
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There's never a dearth of reasons to shoot at the President.
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When you try to unravel something you've written, you belittle it in a way. It was created as a mystery.
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Men with secrets tend to be drawn to each other, not because they want to share what they know but because they need the company of the like-minded, the fellow afflicted.
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There's a moral force in a sentence when it comes out right. It speaks the writer's will to live.
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One truth is the swing of the sentence, the beat and poise, but down deeper it's the integrity of the writer as he matches with the language.
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I think there is a sense of last things in my work that probably comes from a Catholic childhood.
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People who are in power make their arrangements in secret, largely as a way of maintaining and furthering that power.
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'Remember literature, Charlie? It involved getting drunk and getting laid.'
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Rushdie is a hostage.
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Every disaster made us wish for something bigger, grander, more sweeping.
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There's always a period of curious fear between the first sweet-smelling breeze and the time when the rain comes cracking down.
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I embarked on my life - I didn't do anything. I don't have an explanation.