You do what you do out of your private love of the thing itself.

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

The way we live our days, is the way we live our lives.

On plenty of days the writer can write three or four pages, and on plenty of other days he concludes he must throw them away.

I am a frayed and nibbled survivor in a fallen world, and I am getting along. I am aging and eaten and have done my share of eating too. I am not washed and beautiful, in control of a shining world in which everything fits, but instead am wondering awed about on a splintered wreck I've come to care for, whose gnawed trees breathe a delicate air, whose bloodied and scarred creatures are my dearest companions, and whose beauty bats and shines not in its imperfections but overwhelmingly in spite of them.

Self-consciousness is the curse of the city and all that sophistication implies.

No child on earth was ever meant to be ordinary, and you can see it in them, and they know it, too, but then the times get to them, and the wear out their brains learning what folks expect, and spend their strength trying to rise over those same folks.