I think there's a lot of power in listening to one person talking to you. And this should never be underestimated.One person sitting and talking to you and, you're pulled in, in ways that technology and art and all cannot.

Cats are intended to teach us that not everything in nature has a function.

TV news is as bloody as Shakespeare but without the intelligence and the poetry. If you watch television news you know less about the world than if you drank gin out of a bottle

I don't associate work with feelings of satisfaction. Rather, guilt, frustration, and resentment of people who write better than I do.

You don't want to get that sort of sound in your writing that boing that gives you away.

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.

Being Lutheran, Mother believed that self-pity is a deadly sin and so is nostalgia, and she had no time for either