Do not start a story unless you have an ending in mind. You can change the story's ending if you wish, but you should always have a destination.

My whole life experience feeds into my writing. I think that must be true for every writer. Clearly the Army and combat were major influences; just the same, you need to understand that many of the writers we have now couldn't load a revolver.

We choose--or choose not--to be alone when we decide whom we will accept as our fellows, and whom we will reject. Thus an eremite in a mountain is in company, because the birds and coneys, the initiates whose words live in his 'forest books,' and the winds--the messengers of the Increate--are his companions. Another man, living in the midst of millions, may be alone, because there are none but enemies and victims around him.

There's a certain kind of lonely man who rejects love, because he believes that anyone who offers it wouldn't be a lover worth having.

All of us... when we think we are talking most intimately to someone else, are actually addressing an image we have of the person to whom we believe we speak.

Certain mystes aver that the real world has been constructed by the human mind, since our ways are governed by the artificial categories into which we place essentially undifferentiated things, things weaker than our words for them. We believe we invent symbols. The truth is that they invent us; we are their creatures, shaped by their hard, defining edges.

Hope is a psychological mechanism unaffected by external realities.