why something and not nothing? why music and not noise?

What we are reluctant to touch often seems the very fabric of our salvation.

Every sentence has a truth waiting at the end of it and the writer learns how to know it when he finally gets there. On one level this truth is the swing of the sentence, the beat and poise, but down deeper it's the integrity of the writer as he matches with the language. I've always seen myself in sentences. I begin to recognize myself, word by word, as I work through a sentence. The language of my books has shaped me as a man. There's a moral force in a sentence when it comes out right. It speaks the writer's will to live.

In our world we sleep and eat the image and pray to it and wear it too.

The world is full of abandoned meanings. In the commonplace I find unexpected themes and intensities.

I am not comfortable with abstract writing, stories that look like essays: you have to see, I need to see.

[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.