Quotes

Welcome to Hard Times (1967) was the second worst film ever made. The worst was Swamp Fire (1946).

Ragtime (1981) was a brilliant movie for the first 10 minutes, but unfortunately it goes on.

Daniel (1983) was one of the great commercial disasters of all time.

In the dark Bronx days of the Great Depression, I lived on a street named after the brook or burn that once flowed through it. I came down the front steps of my house into a world that was sunny, warm, and clean. Nobody in the neighborhood owned a car, and so the street belonged to the kids. It was our stickball field, our flea market. We flipped pennies against a wall, traded baseball cards, played skelly with soda-bottle caps; we opened our hands for the delicate art of box ball, and abandoned ourselves to the wild neighborhood wars of ringolevio. An eminence who lived on our block was a captain in the Sanitation Department, which is why every other day in summer, the water wagon came grinding up the street, spraying from the sides of its tank a beautiful spreading arc of glistening rainbows that seemed ethereally to be herding this beast of a truck like a pair of angels. And when the water wagon turned the corner and was gone, the street was suddenly quiet except for the bubbling rivulets of water running along the guttered curbs, carrying with it our fleets of walnut shells and ice-cream sticks as we scurried along to see how far they would go before running aground.

[testifying before a U.S government funding committee,1981] The truth is, if you're going to take away the lunches of schoolchildren, the pensions of miners who've contacted black lung, the storefront legal services of the poor who are otherwise stunned into insensibility by the magnitude of their troubles, you might as well get rid of poets, artists and musicians. If you're planning to scrap medical care for the indigent, scholarships for students, daycare centers for the children of working mothers, transportation for the elderly and handicapped - if you're going to eliminate people's service training jobs and then reduce their unemployment benefits after you've put them on the unemployment rolls, taking away their foodstamps in the bargain, then I say the loss of a few poems or arias cannot matter.

The historian will tell you what happened. The novelist will tell you what it felt like.

The writer isn't made in a vacuum. Writers are witnesses. The reason we need writers is because we need witnesses to this terrifying century.

Murders are exciting and lift people into a heart-beating awe as religion is supposed to do, after seeing one in the street young couples will go back to bed and make love, people will cross themselves and thank God for the gift of their stuporous lives, old folks will talk to each other over cups of hot water with lemon because murders are enlivened sermons to be analyzed and considered and relished, they speak to the timid of the dangers of rebellion, murders are perceived as momentary descents of God and so provide joy and hope and righteous satisfaction to parishioners, who will talk about them for years afterward to anyone who will listen.

Writing is an exploration. You start from nothing and learn as you go.

I try to avoid experience if I can. Most experience is bad.

On writing: It's like driving a car at night. You never see further than your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way.