It was a wrong number that started it, the telephone ringing three times in the dead of night, and the voice on the other end asking for someone he was not.

There's hope for everyone. That's what makes the world go round.

We construct a narrative for ourselves, and that's the thread that we follow from one day to the next. People who disintegrate as personalities are the ones who lose that thread.

I guess I wanted to leave America for awhile. It wasn't that I wanted to become an expatriate, or just never come back, I needed some breathing room. I'd already been translating French poetry, I'd been to Paris once before and liked it very much, and so I just went.

All I wanted to do was write - at the time, poems, and prose, too. I guess my ambition was simply to make money however I could to keep myself going in some modest way, and I didn't need much, I was unmarried at the time, no children.

It's extremely difficult to get these jobs because you can't get a job on a ship unless you have seaman's paper's, and you can't get seaman's papers unless you have a job on a ship. There had to be a way to break through the circle, and he was the one who arranged it for me.

I don't know if she should worry too much, I mean some of our greatest writers have had movies made of their books, lots of Hemingway novels were turned into movies, it doesn't hurt the book.

You can't put your feet on the ground until you've touched the sky.

If you're not ready for everything, you're not ready for anything.

I don't think that you can be prescriptive about anything, I mean, life is too complicated. Maybe there are novels where the author has not in the least thought about it in terms of film, which can be turned into good films.

I was always interested in French poetry sort of as a sideline to my own work, I was translating contemporary French poets. That kind of spilled out into translation as a way to earn money, pay for food and put bread on the table.

It was a wrong number that started it, the telephone ringing three times in the dead of night, and the voice on the other end asking for someone he was not.

You see, the interesting thing about books, as opposed, say, to films, is that it's always just one person encountering the book, it's not an audience, it's one to one.

You have to protect it too, you can't let just any stupid person take it and do something demoralizing with it. At the same time, I don't believe in being so rigid about controlling what happens either.

Everything can change at any moment, suddenly and forever.

All through my writing life, I've had this impulse to write autobiographical works.

Baseball is a universe as large as life itself, and therefore all things in life, whether good or bad, whether tragic or comic, fall within its domain.

Chance is an element of life. What I try to do is study what I call the mechanics of reality as carefully as I can.

Changing your mind is probably one of the most beautiful things people can do. And I've changed my mind about a lot of things over the years.

Children, I mean, think of your own childhood, how important the bedtime story was. How important these imaginary experiences were for you. They helped shape reality, and I think human beings wouldn't be human without narrative fiction.

Each book I've done somehow finds its own unique form, a specific way it has to be written, and once I find it, I stick with it.

Even in New York, there are a lot of very attractive girls pedaling around. That just happens to be one of the nice sights in our city, seeing a young woman on a bike.

Every generation always thinks it was better before, and I think people have been saying this for probably thousands of years.

For me, a paragraph in a novel is a bit like a line in a poem. It has its own shape, its own music, its own integrity.

For some reason, all my characters come to me with their names attached to them. I never have to search for the names.

History is present in all my novels. And whether I am directly talking about the sociological moment or just immersing my character in the environment, I am very aware of it.

Holes in the memory. You grab on to some things, others have completely disappeared.

Human beings need stories, and we're looking for them in all kinds of places; whether it's television, whether it's comic books or movies, radio plays, whatever form, people are hungry for stories.

I barely can go shopping for clothes. I find it difficult to walk into stores. The whole thing bores me so much.

I can never say 'why' about anything I do. I suppose I can say 'how' and 'when' and 'what.' But 'why' is impenetrable to me.

I don't think of myself as a metafictional writer at all. I think of myself as a classic writer, a realist writer, who tends to have flights of fancy at times, but nevertheless, my feet are mostly on the ground.

I guess the toughest things in translations are word play, which can never be reproduced exactly.

I knew from the age of 16 that I wanted to be a writer because I just didn't think I could do anything else. So I read and read and wrote short stories and dreamed of escape.

I like the sound a typewriter makes.

I never experiment with anything in my books. Experimentation means you don't know what you're doing.

I really do feel part of America to my very bones; at the same time, I know that I come from somewhere else.

I really have no interest in myself.

I really, truly believe that writing comes out of the body; of course, the mind is working as well, but it's a double thing and that doubleness is united. I mean, you can't separate persona from psyche; you just can't do it.

I started out in life as a poet; I was only writing poetry all through my 20s. It wasn't until I was about 30 that I got serious about writing prose. While I was writing poems, I would often divert myself by reading detective novels; I liked them.

I think I hate cynicism more than anything else. It's the curse of our age, and I want to avoid it at all costs.

I think New York has evolved in my work just the way the city has.

I think if we didn't contradict ourselves, it would be awfully boring. It would be tedious to be alive.

I think it's a very good thing to leave your country and look at it from afar.

I was always very curious as a young man about why older writers who I met seemed so indifferent to what was going on, whereas I, in my 20s, was reading everything. Everything seemed important. But they were only interested in the writers they admired when they were young, and I didn't understand it then, but now, now I understand it.

I woke up one day and thought: 'I want to write a book about the history of my body.' I could justify talking about my mother because it was in her body that my body began.

I write the paragraph, then I'm crossing out, changing words, trying to improve it. When it seems more or less OK, then I type it up because sometimes it's almost illegible, and if I wait, I might not be able to read it the next day.

I'm generous. I give good tips. It's just - the way I live my life, ironically enough, is: I don't want anything. I'm not a consumer. I don't crave objects.

I'm living in the present, thinking about the past, hoping for the future.

I'm not a man deeply interested in technology. It eludes me.