A book begins as a private excitement of the mind.

I have been everywhere because I don't know what I'm looking for.

Time seems to me a drift, a shifting of sand. And my mind is shifting with it. I am wearing away.

I've always felt, as a writer, that radicals are fascinating because they're relations, they have a place in the American family. They're the relatives everyone wishes would go away. They're the embarrassments to decorum and good taste.

I thought of myself as a writer for years before I got around to writing anything.

I lived in New York for a couple months. It seemed to me at first an incredibly clean place with well-dressed people and washed cars and bright-painted red-and-yellow streetcars and white buildings.

Movies are too literal.