I left Princeton, but I graduated Harvard, in 1952.

After the navy, I transferred to Harvard and finished there. I was there the spring term of 1951 and I stayed through the summer term and a whole other year, so I was able to do two years in a little less than a year and a half.

And I finished college because I thought how much it would upset my parents if I didn't.

I was immediately smitten with an attraction to this culture, not in the sense of high culture but of the basic way people behaved towards one another.

My idea was to go to Vienna to study conducting and perhaps play in an orchestra first, so I thought before I got to Vienna I could do with a little training in Paris.

I think situations are more important than plot and character.

Well, I had this little notion - I started writing when I was eleven, writing poetry. I was passionately addicted to it; it was my great refuge through adolescence.

I left Princeton, but I graduated Harvard, in 1952.

My mother could never understand why I didn't write a thriller, which I've finally done.

It's true, I had an extremely delicious life, but that was my life at home, and perhaps because I was only a child, or for whatever reasons, I found the company of others, especially other boys, quite terrifying and upsetting.

When Niki and I moved to Paris, there was also the challenge of Paris, an extremely daunting city.

Music had been my first love among the arts, and I was fascinated by it, as I still am.

My dream, I remember, when I went to boarding school, was to have a study all my own, a little nook someplace where nobody could get at me - nobody, like the football coach.

It has always been something I could do, and it may seem odd that in my case I seem to create an interesting narrative and frustrate the reader's opportunities to follow it at every step.

I thought Cheever was magnificent and that if I could write like him that would be the best I could do. And then I realized that what I really wanted to write had nothing to do with what he was doing.

I love teaching.

I graduated in 1952 and went to Europe, with Niki and our first child Laura, who was then a year old.

Well, my relationship to America at the time I left was very limited.

And then, when I left Princeton in the middle of my sophomore year, I went into the navy.

I'd been brought up on the Upper East Side in a WASP society, which was death on crutches.

What I wanted to do and what I needed to do was something entirely different, and through reading Roussel I learned that I could do what I wanted all on my own and that I didn't have to rely on what had actually happened in my somewhat limited life and reading.

What I said about John was that he liberated me from my anxieties about writing in a correct, acceptable way.

My Life in CIA is the first time that I've ever written a story in my own name.

I was stationed in Norfolk, Virginia, for a while, about which the less said the better, and then I was in the Mediterranean, about which the more said the better.

I also had this mistaken dream, fantasy really - perhaps because I'm good at languages - of being able in both Italy and France to become someone else through my fluency in the language.

My next project is to get back to that. Actually, to learn how to write poetry. I'm not kidding.

Well, the great thing for me about poetry is that in good poems the dislocation of words, that is to say, the distance between what they say they're saying and what they are actually saying is at its greatest.

A man is too apt to forget that in this world he cannot have everything. A choice is all that is left him.

Translation is the paradigm, the exemplar of all writing. It is translation that demonstrates most vividly the yearning for transformation that underlies every act involving speech, that supremely human gift.

Syntax and vocabulary are overwhelming constraints --the rules that run us. Language is using us to talk --we think we're using the language, but language is doing the thinking, we're its slavish agents.

To the humblest among them, who may be listening to me now, I want to say that the masterpiece to which you are paying historic homage this evening is a painting which he has saved.

I don't go out much.

Those with a grateful mindset tend to see the message in the mess. And even though life may knock them down, the grateful find reasons, if even small ones, to get up.

I'm doing whatever I have to do to help my team win. So, instead of being focused on anything from the outside, I'm focused on winning and that next game.

It's not easy to walk out on a marriage and two young kids, and it's the most difficult thing I've ever had to do.

I'm happy to be at home with the kids, in my flannel pajamas; that's a treat.

The next Bill Gates will not start an operating system. The next Larry Page won't start a search engine. The next Mark Zuckerberg won't start a social network company. If you are copying these people, you are not learning from them.

Weapons are an important factor in war, but not the decisive one; it is man and not materials that count.

Pence is a fan of fundraising and does enjoy doing it.

The pressures to get the story first, if wrong, are greater sometimes than the pressures to get the story right, if late.

What happen to the pirates we are supposed to see? Then we go down the chutes, and it's where the pirates were. But they're all gone. There is nothing but skeletons down here!

Cleveland's a great place when you're a kid. You hardly ever get sunburned, without the sun shining.

Children often ask me, they say, 'Well, how do you become a fighter pilot, or how do you become an astronaut, or...?' And I say, 'Love what you're doing and do it very well.'

The art of natural education consists in ignoring the faults of children nine times out of ten, in avoiding immediate interference, which is usually a mistake, and devoting one's whole vigilance to the control of the environment in which the child is growing up, to watching the education which is allowed to go on by itself.

I'm to a point now where you want to play for your fans and all that, but I'm playing for the guys in that huddle. I'm playing for the guys in that locker room.

People thought I was cocky because I didn't talk much. When I first turned pro, reporters asked me who was going to win. I'd say, 'I am' because it was the easier than giving some long, drawn-out answer.

Somewhere along the way to free-market capitalism, the United States became the most wasteful society on the planet.

I shut up and keep my ears and eyes open.

The aging and declining population will have far-reaching impacts. Declining fertility rates will possibly increase immigration. The structure of family and society will inevitably change.