A writer's life is so hazardous that anything he does is bad for him. Anything that happens to him is bad: failure's bad, success is bad; impoverishment is bad, money is very, very bad. Nothing good can happen... Except the act of writing.

There is no longer any such thing as fiction or nonfiction; there's only narrative.

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

Writing is like driving at night in the fog. You can only see as far as your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way.

A novel is a printed circuit through which flows the force of a reader's own life.

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.

Poems have ideas. The ideas of poems come out of their emotions and their emotions are carried on images.