The thing that was important to me about Hemingway at the time was that Hemingway taught me that you could be a writer and get away with it.

Smart people understand that there is no such thing as paranoia. It is just another mask for ignorance.

At age 22 I set what I insist is an all-time record for distance hitchhiking in Bermuda shorts: 3,700 miles in three weeks.

It never got weird enough for me.

I have no taste for either poverty or honest labor, so writing is the only recourse left for me

Richard Nixon has never been one of my favorite people anyway. For years I've regarded his existence as a monument to all the rancid genes and broken chromosomes that corrupt the possibilities of the American Dream; he was a foul caricature of himself, a man with no soul, no inner convictions, with the integrity of a hyena and the style of a poison toad. The Nixon I remembered was absolutely humorless; I couldn't imagine him laughing at anything except maybe a paraplegic who wanted to vote Democratic but couldn't quite reach the lever on the voting machine.

A little bit of this town goes a very long way.