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

To crank myself up I stood on a jack and ran myself up. I tightened myself like a bolt. I inserted myself in a vise-clamp and wound the handle till the pressure built. I drank coffee in titrated doses. It was a tricky business, requiring the finely tuned judgment of a skilled anesthesiologist. There was a tiny range within which coffee was effective, short of which it was useless, and beyond which, fatal.

The secret is not to write about what you love best, but about what you, alone, love at all.

An Eskimo shaman said, Life's greatest danger lies in the fact that man's food consists entirely of souls.

What could you say to a dying person that would not enrage by its triviality?

Even if things are as bad as they could possible be, and as meaningless, then matters of truth are themselves indifferent; we may as well please our sensibilities and, with as much spirit as we can muster, go out with a buck and a wing.

The extravagant gesture is the very stuff of creation.