Of course, everyone in the New World is an immigrant or a descendant of immigrants, and immigrants have built America and continue to do so. Legal or illegal, they are almost universally good people who work to better their lot and that of their children. Mark Helprin Read Quote
Of course, you would have to be insane to hope your child grows up to be a playwright or poet. Given the odds, you would have to be quite cavalier about your children’s future. Mark Helprin Read Quote
As much as I love art, there is no art as fine as the world we have been given. Mark Helprin Read Quote
In an interview, I lose control even of what I am, for it is the interviewer who edits me, finally, into what he thinks I am, and never have I been happy with someone else’s version of my life after that person has spent an entire two or three hours fathoming it. Mark Helprin Read Quote
The British monarchy has the political and constitutional task of subtracting from the government and governors of Britain the papal and kingly airs that in America, because we have no such institution, unfortunately adhere to the president. Mark Helprin Read Quote
Barnes & Noble is able to publish price-reduced non-copyrighted works not so much because it saves the 10 percent to 15 percent of revenue that would go to the gruel-eating authors, but because it saves the 50 percent that would go to the publishers. Mark Helprin Read Quote
I was raised on the Hudson, in a house that had been the stable of the financier and Civil War general Brayton Ives. In midcentury, we had fire pits in the floor for heating, and rats everywhere, because they nested in the hay insulation. Mark Helprin Read Quote
I’m sort of murdered for selling books. The idea is, if you make money your work can’t be literary. Mark Helprin Read Quote
