If you reveal everything, bare every feeling, ask for understanding, you lose something crucial to your sense of yourself. You need to know things that others don't know. It's what no one knows about you that allows you to know yourself.

[I]n the American soul there is a lonely individual standing in a vast landscape. 
He is either on a horse or driving a car, depending, and either way he’s carrying a gun. 
This is one of the essential images in American mythology.

We surrounded ourselves with smoke and loud noise. That's the way we chose to live. I'm prepared to defend it.

California deserves whatever it gets. Californians invented the concept of life-style. This alone warrants their doom.

The figure of the gunman in the window was inextricable from the victim and his history. This sustained Oswald in his cell. It gave him what he needed to live. The more time he spent in a cell, the stronger he would get. Everybody knew who he was now.

In my experience, writing a novel tends to create its own structure, its own demands, its own language, its own ending.

A dead afternoon in a dark bar was not the worst of fates.