When I don't feel hurt, I hope they bury me.

Of course it would cost something, but he was an expert in cutting corners; and when there were no more corners left he would make circles rounder.

The past exudes legend: one can't make pure clay of time's mud. There is no life that can be recaptured wholly; as it was.Which is to say that all biography is ultimately fiction.

As long as a man stays alive he can't tell what chances will pop up next. But a dead man signs no checks.

It's one thing for a man not to know, not to have learned; it's another not to be able to live by what one does know.

First drafts are for learning what your novel or story is about. Revision is working with that knowledge to enlarge and enhance an idea, to re-form it.... The first draft of a book is the most uncertain-where you need guts, the ability to accept the imperfect until it is better.

There is in the darkness a unity, if you will, that cannot be achieved in any other environment, a blending of self with what the self perceives, and exquisite mystical experience.