Writing is immensely difficult. The short forms especially.

There is really no fiction or non-fiction; there is only narrative. One mode of perception has no greater claim on the truth than the other; that the distance has perhaps to do with distance - narrative distance - from the characters; it has to do with the kind of voice that is talking, but it certainly hasn't to do with the common distribution between fact and imagination.

There are moments when I cannot bear this unremitting consciousness. It knows only itself. Awake, I am in a continuum with my dreams. I feel my typewriters, my table, my chair to have that assurance of a solid world, where things take up space, where is not the endless emptiness of insubstantial thought that leads to nowhere but itself. My memories pale as I prevail upon them again and again. They become more and more ghostly. I fear nothing so much as losing them altogether and having only my blank endless mind to live in.

When you're working well, you don't do research. Whatever you need comes to you.

We make a mistake to condescend to the past as if it were preparatory to our own time.

We're always attracted to the edges of what we are, out by the edges where it's a little raw and nervy.

The three most important documents a free society gives are a birth certificate, a passport, and a library card.