I don't engage in self-censorship. But I do change everybody to have red hair in the last draft. ... If you give people red hair when in real life they haven't got red hair, I've noticed they don't recognize themselves, anyway.

The six and one-fourth hours' television watching (the American average per day) which non-reading children do is what is called alpha-level learning. The mind needn't make any pictures since the pictures are provided, so the mind cuts current as low as it can.

your soul needs to be lonely so that its strangest elements can moil about, curl and growl and jump, fail and get triumphant, all inside you. Sociable people have the most trouble hearing their unconscious. They have trouble getting rid of clichés because clichés are sociable.

The principle of literature is devotion to the particulars of life.

No work of literature is the product of only one or two conscious ideas. A story is mysteriously dense of meaning.

It is very difficult to teach navigation theory to someone who clings to the shore.

The more original a short-story writer, the odder looking the assortment of things he or she puts together for a story.