On art and politics: “I think writers are not only writers, they are also citizens.”

“Rather than live on in the hearts and minds of my fellow man, I would rather live on in my apartment.”

“The phrase I like to use to describe my sense of time—a play on comparative literature—is comparative time.”

“Mere fact has no chance of being formally perfect. It will get in the way, it will be all elbows.”

“It’s not a love of poetry readings that attracts those who do come to them but theater.”

“People are too busy putting things under microscopes and so forth. Creativity is greater than the sum of its parts.”

“Every novel is—at the beginning—the same opening of a door onto a completely unknown space.”

“I think Shakespeare got drunk after he finished King Lear. That he had a ball writing it.”

“It was pretty easy to picture myself at his [Castro’s] side. He was, in some ways, the good father.”

“To be a poet did not occur to me. It was indeed a threshold guarded by demons.”

“There was no mystery: even before I learned to read and write I knew it was in order to write poetry.”

“You really can’t write unless you read. You have to know what the game is all about.”

“Did you know that forty percent of the words used by Shakespeare were used by him only once?”

“Every time I must find something to do that will look like something a little beyond my capabilities.”

Interviewer: “You [think] that not only should a writer have enemies but that he should actually cultivate them?” Cela: “Yes, so that they help him move up the ladder.”

On the Sexual Revolution:
“ . . . some very plausible stuff is being written by women in a way that most men are not doing . . . ”

“There's the shattering randomness of [the Kennedy assassination]: the missing motive, the violence that people seem to watch simultaneously from a disinterested distance.”

“When I did Dutch Shea, Jr., I knew the last line was going to be, ‘I believe in God.’”

On assembling a Homeric football team: “I know who'd be thrown off the team as captain. Agamemnon. He's a disaster as a leader!”

“The institution of slavery is a stain on this nation's soul which will never be cleansed . . . There's a second sin that's almost as great, and that's emancipation.”

“Once Tobias Wolff and I gave a reading out in North Dakota, and a man came up to tell us he read our books during his lunch breaks, sitting on his tractor out in the wheat fields.”

“. . . If [you] want to publish the lie perceived behind the interview, [you have] to write fiction.”

“Editing is simply the application of the common sense of any good reader.”

On the extinction of dinosaurs: “When they died, they died in a very clean way
. . . This will not happen with human beings. When we die there will be a terrible breath of poison.”

“Novelists [are] only a couple of hundreds of years old. Playwrights [are] a couple of thousands of years old.”

“All young men are unhappy. That's why they identify so strongly with Hamlet. They're unhappy in a formless kind of way . . . [they’re] undefined, and being undefined is rather painful.”

“At lunch Robert [Bly] said, ‘Well, Mr. Hall, what do you think of having a poet for a son?’ As I feared, my father didn't know what to say; poetry was embarrassing, somehow. So I said, ‘Too bad your father doesn't have the same problem . . . ’”

On poetry’s power to suspend violence: “It can entrance you for a moment above the pool of your own consciousness and your own possibilities.”

On writer’s block: “If an electrician said, I have electrician's block. . . . He would be committed. One thing would be certain, and that is that his paralysis in the face of his work would have only to do with him, and not with his craft.”

“The poetry shock that hit the U.K. in the sixties started before the Beatles. Sylvia responded to the first ripples of it. In a sense, Ariel is a response to those first signs, and she never heard the Beatles.”

“I believe that political correctness can be a form of linguistic fascism . . . The only way to react is to get up in the morning and start the day by saying four or five vastly politically incorrect things before breakfast!”

“There is an important erotic element in A Thousand and One Nights, which is one of the keys to understanding the Orient.”

“I had three choices: to conform to my own beliefs, which meant death; complete silence, which meant another kind of death; to pay a tribute, a bribe. I chose the third solution by writing The Long Winter.”

“Humor needs to come in under cover of darkness, in disguise, and surprise people.”

On a true fool natural: “He never stops being a fool to save himself; he never tries to do anything but anger his master . . . Hunter Thompson is a fool natural. Neal Cassady was a fool natural, the best one we knew.”

“The one thing you can bet is that spying is never over. Spying is like the wiring in this building: It's just a question of who takes it over and switches on the lights. It will go on and on and on.”

“I wouldn’t say that I dislike the young. I’m simply not a fan of naïveté.”

“I have many times been praised for my lack of animosity towards the Germans. It's not a philosophical virtue. It's a habit of having my second reactions before the first.”

Quoting Neruda: “I have a chest full of all the insults, villainies, and infamies a man is capable of withstanding. . . . If you become famous, you will have to go through that.”

On American English: “It seems to me that the contrast between adjacent syllables has lessened and the result is an over-reliance on enjambment. Now enjambment is a fine, intellectually strong aid, but like all such things it becomes tiresome and calls too much attention to itself.”

“Sufism . . . it gives relief in the midst of battle . . . ”

On his play Bobby Gould in Hell: “The Devil says [to Bobby], ‘Nothing's black and white; nothing's black and white—what about a panda? What about a panda, you dumb fuck!’”

“[The zoologist George Schaller and I] had walked away from civilization through mythic mountains and ancient villages in clear October light—but what a pity to say that to each other!”

“Insight comes, more often than not, from looking at what's been on the table all along, in front of everybody, rather than from discovering something new.”

On his writing process:
“Occasionally, something sticks. And then I follow that. The only image I can think of is a man walking around with an iron rod in his hand during a lightning storm.”

“A book is finished and appears and I feel, Well, next time I will unveil myself. And when the next book appears, I have the same feeling. And then your life ends, and that's it.”

“My guess would be that our folly lies not in what threatens us, or even what eludes us, but in our inability to adapt to it.”

“[Imperialism] allowed people to break away from shackling old traditions and heritages. It introduced the world to fresh ideas and new opportunities. These are the contributions that matter for the redemption and the unity of us all.”

On female friendships:
“Hating, fighting one another, and joining men in their condemnation of ourselves [is] a typical example of what dominated people do.”

“Any story that’s going to be any good is usually going to change.”

“You can’t write a traditional novel without giving your characters moral problems and judgments.”

“Something in late life I have come to understand [is the connection between] hysteria and the sense of the absurd.”

“If you write in a troubled part of the world, everything is interpreted allegorically.”

“The sensation of falling into the past is not unlike that of coming home for the holidays from a new, strenuous, unpleasant school and finding
oneself back in wholly familiar surroundings. . . .”

“One of the first things I tell my classes is, If you want to write, keep a low overhead.”

“I didn't set out to be a troublesome writer, but if that's what I've been, I am totally unrepentant.”

“Advice and instruction have always fascinated me, partly because of their pathos—so little is transmitted in any given instance of advice or pedagogy.”

Imagining Emma Bovary in bed: “[She’d be] rather stunned and frantic, I would think. And I don't say it to be comic. I suspect stunned and frantic, breathless and shockingly cold to the touch.”

On the dangers of researching his books in the field: “I could never be left alone. I had to run when they ran. It can be pretty scary to get lost in a building. You're with the cops. Everybody hates the cops.”

“I was having tea with [Yeats] one day, and I remember he picked up a pot of tea and, finding that it was already full of old tea, he opened the window of his Georgian house and flung the contents into the square! Rhetoric poured out of him all the while.”

“All art is a lie, insofar as truth is defined by the Supreme Court. After all, Picasso's goat isn't a goat. Is the artist a liar, or simply one for whom even a fact is not a fact?”

“[The idea of] ‘free love’ . . . was implicit in communism, because Lenin said ‘Sex should be like having a glass of water.’”

“The real event of the 1980s was . . . the emergence of great looting fortunes . . . which made us revise the value of everything—not to the benefit of society . . . ”

“That is the dream of all novelists—that one of their characters will become ‘somebody.’”

“I don't for a minute think that Hitler is like Joan of Arc. But I think that at that deep level of tropisms, Hitler or Stalin must have experienced the same tropisms as anyone else.”

“[The inspiration that comes to authors of fiction] is not an act of intelligence.”

“I hate endings. Just detest them. Beginnings are definitely the most exciting, middles are perplexing and endings are a disaster.”

“I don't like uniforms. I don't like people abdicating their identity to become part of some group, and then becoming obsessed with this and making capital of it . . . ”

“In general, I distrust philosophy. Plato recommended chasing poets from the city; the ‘great’ Heidegger was a Nazi; Lukacs was a communist; and J. P. Sartre wrote: ‘Any anti-communist is a dog.’”

“[When you write a play] you walk into a forest without a knife, without a compass. But . . . if you have a sense of geography, you find that you’re clearing a path and getting to the right place.”

“I've been accused of humanizing the Nazis, to which I can only say, you can't blame me for that. God did that. Go talk to him. It's a strange thing for an atheist to say.”

“Doom scenarios, even though they might be true, are not politically or psychologically effective. The first step . . . is to make us love the world rather than to make us fear for the end of the world.”

“[My fairy tale] is about moral responsibility—the responsibility you have in getting your wish not to cheat and step on other people's toes, because it rebounds.”

On Yeats’s assertion that one must choose between the life and the work: “Of course, if by life you mean life with other people, Yeats's dictum is true. Writing requires huge amounts of solitude.”

“What you have to do as a writer is write day in and day out no matter what happens.”

On his family: “Instead of expecting to make a big strike somewhere, which is a very American notion . . . I would have liked to see a little more just plain stick-to-itiveness at times. The longest journey begins with a single step . . . ”

“Bookishness, highest literacy, every technique of cultural propaganda and training not only can accompany bestiality and oppression and despotism but at certain points foster it.”

“I don't really think it will make much difference to me when I'm dead whether I'm read or not . . . just as whether I'm dead or not won't mean much to me when I'm dead.”

Describing a doctoral thesis on Sophie’s Choice: “There was a footnote, which I swear to you said, ‘Where the movie is obscure I will refer to William Styron's novel for clarification.’”

“Any critic of Cezanne who described him as a painter of country scenes would be moving in the wrong direction. You must begin with the question of style . . . ”

On first discovering his sense of humor: “I stood up with my right hand gradually becoming noticeably weird and said: ‘If I forget thee, O Jerusalem, may my right hand lose its cunning and my tongue cleave to duh woof of my mout.’”

“A female who expresses herself decisively seems to this world someone armed with ammunition.”

“I think there is real anger in life to be expressed, there is great injustice, but I also think there is dignity.”

On fighting against didactic intentions: “I've spent a large part of my life trying to sit on it, to keep it down . . . I think the struggle with it may have brought a certain kind of objectivity into my work.”

“I don’t write particularly to effect social change. I believe writing can do that, but that’s not why I write. I work as an artist. All art is political in the sense that it serves someone’s politics."

“I can't find a model, a female literary model who did the work she wanted to do and led an ordinary heterosexual life and had children. Where is she?”

“It is folly to believe that you can bring the psychology of an individual successfully to life without putting him very firmly in a social setting.”