what matters most is how well you walk through the fire

Learn, he says, that there will be hours, days and months ahead of feeling absolutely terrible and nothing can change that; neither new girlfriends, health professionals, changes of diet, dope, humility, or God.

When a writer is swayed with his fame and his fortune, you can float him down the river with the turds.

Pull a string, a puppet moves ... each man must realize that it can all disappear very quickly: the cat, the woman, the job, the front tire, the bed, the walls, the room; all our necessities including love, rest on foundations of sand - and any given cause, no matter how unrelated: the death of a boy in Hong Kong or a blizzard in Omaha ... can serve as your undoing. all your chinaware crashing to the kitchen floor, your girl will enter and you'll be standing, drunk, in the center of it and she'll ask: my god, what's the matter? and you'll answer: I don't know, I don't know.

He asked, "what makes a man a writer?" "well," I said, "it's simple, it's either you get it down on paper or you jump off a bridge. writers are desperate people and when they stop being desperate they stop being writers." "are you desperate?" "I don't know.

I am not a man who looks for solutions in God or politics. If somebody else wants to do the dirty work and create a better world for us and he can do it, I will accept it.

There's no way I can stop writing, it's a form of insanity.