I'll tell you why I like writing: it's just jumping into a pool. I get myself into a kind of trance. I engage the world, but it's also wonderful to just escape. I try to find the purities out of the confusion. It's pretty old-fashioned, but it's fun.

Literature is the history of the soul.

A writers job is to destroy and then to build the thing back up again by a chosen means.

My best stories come out of nowhere, with no concern for form at all.

I always intended to be light and open. I misjudged the American audience.

If you are able to explain suffering, a man once told him, you weren't really there.

I hate to be fatalistic about it, but alcoholism, it's just in your genes. We had some of it in my family, and it just got me.