We writers don't really think about whether what we write is good or not. It's too much to worry about. We just put the words down, trying to get them right, operating by some inner sense of pitch and proportion, and from time to time, we stick the stuff in an envelope and ship it to an editor.

Some luck lies in not getting what you thought you wanted but getting what you have, which once you have got it you may be smart enough to see is what you would have wanted had you known.

Dogs don't lie and why should I? Strangers come they growl and bark, they know their loved ones in the dark, Now let me, by night or day, Be just as full of truth as they.

People meet writers and are bowled over when the writer is friendly to them and invites them to his house for a glass of wine or to shoot up heroin or whatever they do, and they talk their heads off, and a year later it comes out in a book, and there follow years of bitter and fruitless litigation, and that is why you should always keep a writer at arm's length.

I love rhymes; I love to write a poem about New York and rhyme 'oysters' with 'The Cloisters.' And 'The lady from Knoxville who bought her brassieres by the boxful.' I just feel a sort of small triumph.

Nothing that readers say or do strikes me as a nuisance. Anyone who cracks open a book of mine is, to me, a gem.

There is almost no marital problem that can't be helped enormously by taking off your clothes.