You have to quit confusing a madness with a mission.

There won't be any biographies of me because, for only one reason, lives spent between the house and the chicken yard do not make exciting copy.

I don’t want any of this artificial superficial feeling stimulated by the choir. Today I have proved myself a glutton—​for Scotch oatmeal cookies and erotic thought. There is nothing left to say of me.

In most good stories, it is the character's personality that creates the action of the story. If you start with real personality, a real character, then something is bound to happen.

You have to quit confusing a madness with a mission.

Children know by instinct that hell is an absence of love, and they can pick out theirs without missing.

I feel that whatever virtues the novel may have are very much connected with the limitations you mention. I am not writing a conventional novel, and I think that the quality of the novel I write will derive precisely from the peculiarity or aloneness, if you will, of the experience I write from.