To hell with them. Nothing hurts if you don't let it.

You ought to be ironical the minute you get out of bed. You ought to wake up with your mouth full of pity.

Once writing has become your major vice and greatest pleasure only death can stop it.

To stay in places and to leave, to trust, to distrust, to no longer believe and believe again, . . . to watch the snow come, to watch it go, to hear rain on a tent, to know where I can find what I want.

You know that fiction, prose rather, is possibly the roughest trade of all in writing. You do not have the reference, the old important reference. You have the sheet of blank paper, the pencil, and the obligation to invent truer than things can be true. You have to take what is not palpable and make it completely palpable and also have it seem normal and so that it can become a part of experience of the person who reads it.

As you get older it is harder to have heroes, but it is sort of necessary.

A cat has absolute honesty.