Boxing is a celebration of the lost religion of masculinity all the more trenchant for its being lost.

To write a novel is to embark on a quest that is very romantic. People have visions, and the next step is to execute them. That's a very romantic project. Like Edvard Munch's strange dreamlike canvases where people are stylized, like 'The Scream.' Munch must have had that vision in a dream, he never saw it.

My theory is that literature is essential to society in the way that dreams are essential to our lives. We can't live without dreaming - as we can't live without sleep. We are 'conscious' beings for only a limited period of time, then we sink back into sleep - the 'unconscious.' It is nourishing, in ways we can't fully understand.

In love there are two things - bodies and words.

As a teacher at Princeton, I'm surrounded by people who work hard so I just make good use of my time. And I don't really think of it as work - writing a novel, in one sense, is a problem-solving exercise.

Night comes to the desert all at once, as if someone turned off the light.

If food is poetry, is not poetry also food?

When you are writing literary writing, you are communicating something subtextual with emotions and poetry. The prose has to have a voice; it's not just typing. It takes a while to get that voice.

The relationship between parents and children, but especially between mothers and daughters, is tremendously powerful, scarcely to be comprehended in any rational way.

For some reason, voters can be brainwashed, and they vote sometimes against their own best interests, let alone voting against the interests of people who need them, like people who are disenfranchised and people who are poor and so forth.

As a farm girl, even when I was quite young, I had my 'farm chores' - but I had time also to be alone, to explore the fields, woods and creek side. And to read.

The worst cynicism: a belief in luck.

If you are a writer you locate yourself behind a wall of silence and no matter what you are doing, driving a car or walking or doing housework you can still be writing, because you have that space.

Boxing has become America's tragic theater.

I was brought up to be sympathetic toward others.

I should say, one of the things about being a widow or a widower, you really, really need a sense of humor, because everything's going to fall apart.

Obviously the imagination is fueled by emotions beyond the control of the conscious mind.

I've learned from experience that the greater part of our happiness or misery depends on our dispositions and not on our circumstances.

I am determined to be cheerful and happy in whatever situation I may find myself. For I have learned that the greater part of our misery or unhappiness is determined not by our circumstance but by our disposition.

The greater part of our happiness or misery depends on our dispositions and not our circumstances.

The greater part of our happiness or misery depends on our dispositions and not on our circumstances. We carry the seeds of the one or the other about with us in our minds wherever we go.

Madam, I have been looking for a person who disliked gravy all my life; let us swear eternal friendship.

Life is to be fortified by many friendships. To love and to be loved is the greatest happiness of existence.

Marriage resembles a pair of shears, so joined that they cannot be separated; often moving in opposite directions, yet always punishing anyone who comes between them.

Great men hallow a whole people, and lift up all who live in their time.

A great deal of talent is lost to the world for want of a little courage. Every day sends to their graves obscure men whose timidity prevented them from making a first effort.

Have the courage to be ignorant of a great number of things, in order to avoid the calamity of being ignorant of everything.

Meetings are indispensable when you don't want to do anything.

War remains the decisive human failure.

Under capitalism, man exploits man. Under communism, it's just the opposite.

Wealth is not without its advantages and the case to the contrary, although it has often been made, has never proved widely persuasive.

Wealth, in even the most improbable cases, manages to convey the aspect of intelligence.

Much literary criticism comes from people for whom extreme specialization is a cover for either grave cerebral inadequacy or terminal laziness, the latter being a much cherished aspect of academic freedom.

By all but the pathologically romantic, it is now recognized that this is not the age of the small man.

We all agree that pessimism is a mark of superior intellect.

All of the great leaders have had one characteristic in common: it was the willingness to confront unequivocally the major anxiety of their people in their time. This, and not much else, is the essence of leadership.

The enemy of the conventional wisdom is not ideas but the march of events.

One of the greatest pieces of economic wisdom is to know what you do not know.

Money differs from an automobile or mistress in being equally important to those who have it and those who do not.

The modern conservative is engaged in one of man's oldest exercises in moral philosophy; that is, the search for a superior moral justification for selfishness.

There are times in politics when you must be on the right side and lose.

Politics is the art of choosing between the disastrous and the unpalatable.

Liberalism is, I think, resurgent. One reason is that more and more people are so painfully aware of the alternative.

In the United States, though power corrupts, the expectation of power paralyzes.

In any great organization it is far, far safer to be wrong with the majority than to be right alone.

Economics is extremely useful as a form of employment for economists.

Humor is richly rewarding to the person who employs it. It has some value in gaining and holding attention, but it has no persuasive value at all.

More die in the United States of too much food than of too little.

Self-esteem is as important to our well-being as legs are to a table. It is essential for physical and mental health and for happiness.

When in doubt, mumble; when in trouble, delegate; when in charge, ponder.