Writers who can't invent stories often substitute style for narrative. They remind me of the painter who couldn't paint people, so he painted chairs.

What suffering has taught me is the uselessness of suffering.

We can't all be friends and relatives as the world is; most of us have to be strangers.

The whole history of baseball has the quality of mythology.

Somewhere I put it this way: first drafts are for learning what one’s fiction wants him to say. Revision works with that knowledge to enlarge and enhance an idea, to reform it. Revision is one of the exquisite pleasures of writing.

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.

... we are all terribly alone no matter what people say.