Housework's the hardest work in the world. That's why men won't do it.

A writer's working hours are his waking hours. He is working as long as he is conscious and frequently when he isn't.

The writer is a writer because he cannot help it. It is a compulsion.

I don't know what it is that makes a writer go to his desk in his shut-off room day after day after year after year unless it is the sure knowledge that not to have done the daily stint of writing that day is infinitely more agonizing than to write.

I sometimes wonder ... if the land is not destroying the people who inhabit it as the people who inhabit it are destroying the land. A magic continent, a Peculiar Treasure, stuffed with riches, millions in it are starving in the midst of plenty.

Anything can have happened in Oklahoma. Practically everything has.

People permit life to slide past them like a deft pickpocket, their purse-not yet missed and now too late-in his hand.