One day in Dipstick, Nebraska, or Landfill, Oklahoma, is worth more to me than an eternity in Dante's plastic Paradiso, or Yeats's gold-plated Byzantium.

I would like to evoke the sense of wonder and magic in the reader but without invoking the mystical, the supernatural or the transcendent.

Style: There is something in too much verbal felicity (as in Joyce or Nabokov or Borges) that can betray the writer into technique for the sake of technique.

Most of us lead lives of chaotic improvisation from day to day, bawling for peace while plunging grimly into fresh disorders.

Literature, like anything else, can become a wearisome business if you make a lifetime specialty of it. A healthy, wholesome man would no more spend his entire life reading great books than he would packing cookies for Nabisco.

We know so very little about this strange planet we live on, this haunted world where all answers lead only to more mystery.

I am hopeful, though not full of hope, and the only reason I don't believe in happy endings is because I don't believe in endings.