I think that as you learn more about writing you learn to be direct.

Making reality real is art's responsibility. It is a practical assignment, then, a self-assignment: to achieve, by a cultivated sensitivity for observing life, a capacity for receiving impressions, a lonely, unremitting, unaided, unaidable vision, and transferring this vision without distortion to it onto the pages of a novel, where, if the reader is so persuaded, it will turn into the reader's illusion.

Passion is our ground, our island - do others exist?

People are mostly layers of violence and tenderness wrapped like bulbs, and it is difficult to say what makes them onions or hyacinths.

How can you go out on a limb if you do not know your own tree? No art ever came out of not risking your neck. And risk--experiment--is a considerable part of the joy of doing.

Children, like animals use all their senses to discover the world. Then artists come along and discover it the same way...Or now and then we'll hear from an artisit who's never lost it.

Radio, sewing machine, bookends, ironing board and that great big piano lamp - peace, that's what I like. Butterbean vines planted all along the front where the strings are.