Nothing needs to happen to a writer’s life after they are 20. By then they’ve experienced more than enough to last their creative life.

Unadaptability is often a virtue.

A story is a way to say something that can’t be said any other way, and it takes every word in the story to say what the meaning is.

You have to quit confusing a madness with a mission.

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.

I know that the writer does call up the general and maybe the essential through the particular, but this general and essential is still deeply embedded in mystery. It is not answerable to any of our formulas.

The fiction of Ayn Rand is as low as you can get re fiction. I hope you picked it up off the floor of the subway and threw it in the nearest garbage pail. She makes Mickey Spillane look like Dostoevsky.