Whenever you feel like criticizing any one... just remember that all the people in this world haven't had the advantages that you've had.

There was never a good biography of a good novelist. There couldn't be. He is too many people if he's any good.

The Montana sunset lay between the mountains like a giant bruise from which darkened arteries spread across a poisoned sky.

An artist is someone who can hold two opposing viewpoints and still remain fully functional.

Action is character.

A love affair is like a short story--it has a beginning, a middle, and an end. The beginning was easy, the middle might drag, invaded by commonplace, but the end, instead of being decisive and well knit with that element of revelatory surprise as a well-written story should be, it usually dissipated in a succession of messy and humiliating anticlimaxes.

There’s a writer for you,” he said. “Knows everything and at the same time he knows nothing.” [narrator]It was my first inkling that he was a writer. And while I like writers—because if you ask a writer anything you usually get an answer—still it belittled him in my eyes. Writers aren’t people exactly. Or, if they’re any good, they’re a whole lot of people trying so hard to be one person. It’s like actors, who try so pathetically not to look in mirrors. Who lean backward trying—only to see their faces in the reflecting chandeliers.