“The faith in an afterlife, however much our reason ridicules it, very modestly extends our faith that each moment of our consciousness will be followed by another - that a coherent matrix has been prepared for this precious self of ours. The guarantee that our self enjoys an intended relation to the outer world is most, if not all, of what we ask from religion. God is the self projected onto reality by our natural and necessary optimism. He is the not-me personified.”

“One does not go to Moscow to get fat.”

“Writers may be disreputable, incorrigible, early to decay or late to bloom but they dare to go it alone.”

“Most of American life consists of driving somewhere and then returning home, wondering why the hell you went.”

“I must say, when I reread myself, it's the poetry I tend to look at. It's the most exciting to write, and it's over the quickest.”

“Writing criticism is to writing fiction and poetry as hugging the shore is to sailing in the open sea.”

“The Founding Fathers in their wisdom decided that children were an unnatural strain on parents. So they provided jails called schools, equipped with tortures called an education.”

“Now that I am sixty, I see why the idea of elder wisdom has passed from currency.”

“I know more about what it's like to be elderly and infirm and kind of stupid, the way you get forgetful, but on the other hand I'm a littler, wiser, dare we say? The word 'wisdom' has kind of faded out of our vocabulary, but yeah, I'm a little wiser.”

“Mars has long exerted a pull on the human imagination. The erratically moving red star in the sky was seen as sinister or violent by the ancients: The Greeks identified it with Ares, the god of war; the Babylonians named it after Nergal, god of the underworld. To the ancient Chinese, it was Ying-huo, the fire planet.”

“The first breath of adultery is the freest; after it, constraints aping marriage develop.”