One of the few things I know about writing is this: Spend it all, shoot it, play it, lose it, all, right away, every time. Do not hoard what seems good for a later place in the book, or for another book, give it, give it all, give it now.

Novels written with film contracts in mind have a faint but unmistakable, and ruinous, odor.

Old memories are very easy to get except that once you write about something you've destroyed it.

Having chosen this foolishness, I was a free being. How could the world ever stop me, how could I betray myself, if I was not afraid?

I think the dying pray at the last not "please," but "thank you," as a guest thanks his host at the door.

What I sought in books was imagination. It was depth, depth of thought and feeling; some sort of extreme of subject matter; some nearness to death; some call to courage. I myself was getting wild; I wanted wildness, originality, genius, rapture, hope. ... What I sought in books was a world whose surfaces, whose people and events and days lived, actually matched the exaltation of the interior life. There you could live.

When I first read the words 'introvert' and 'extrovert' when I was 10, I thought I was both.