My idea of writing is of unflinching and continual effort, somehow trying to find the right words until you reach a point where you can make no further progress and you either have something or you don’t.

I write down portions, maybe fragments, and perhaps an imperfect view of what Im hoping to write. Out of that, I keep trying to find exactly what I want.

The dreams are the skeleton of all reality.

There comes a time when you realize that everything is a dream, and only those things preserved in writing have any possibility of being real.

In 1957, I decided: write or perish.

You are perfectly entitled to invent your life and to claim that it's true.

I like men who have known the best and the worst, whose life has been anything but a smooth trip. Storms have battered them, they have lain, sometimes for months on end, becalmed. There is a residue even if they fail. It has not been all tinkling; there have been grand chords.