How do people come up with a date and a time to take life from another man? Who made them God?

The artist must be like a heart surgeon. He must approach something with sympathy, but with a sort of coldness and work and work until he finds some kind of perfection in his work. You can't have blood splashing all over the place. Things must be done very cleanly.

Why is it that, as a culture, we are more comfortable seeing two men holding guns than holding hands?

The Six Golden Rules of Writing: Read, read, read, and write, write, write.

Sometimes you got to hurt something to help something. Sometimes you have to plow under one thing in order for something else to grow.

I suppose I started writing seriously at 16 years old. I thought I wrote a novel at 16 and sent it to New York! They sent it back because it wasn't novel.

...my heart may have been in it but my soul was not.