The genius of the primitive mind is that it can render human helplessness in noble and beautiful ways.

There's a moral force in a sentence when it comes out right. It speaks the writer's will to live.

I've never made an outline for any novel that I've written. Never.

There is a world inside the world.

Do people still shoot at presidents? I thought there were more stimulating targets.' (20)

It frequently happens that I begin a novel with just a visual image of something, a vague sense of people in three dimensional space.

Writing is a form of personal freedom. It frees us from the mass identity we see in the making all around us. In the end, writers will write not to be outlaw heroes of some underculture but mainly to save themselves, to survive as individuals.