The universe is illusion merely, not one speck of it real, and we are not only its victims, falling always into or smashed by a planet slung by the sun-but also its captives, bound by the mineral-made ropes of our senses.

Writers serve as the memory of a people. They chew over our public past.

Our life seems cursed to be a wiggle merely, and a wandering without end.

Art is like an ill-trained Labrador retriever that drags you out into traffic.

why did I have to keep learning this same thing over and over?

The more you read, the more you will write. The better the stuff you read, the better the stuff you will write.

If I actually believed that the progress of human understanding depended on our crop of contemporary novelists, I would shoot myself.