As soon as you bring up money, I notice, conversation gets sociological, then political, then moral.

There are five things that societies do: They reproduce; they produce food; they organize themselves in terms of law; they organize themselves in terms of belief; and they make art. Four of them are about conformity, and in these, everything would go more smoothly if people just would shut up and do what they're told. But in art it doesn't work that way.

Art doesn't exist if you just do what you're told. It only exists as an exercise of individual taste and freedom.

Because your goal is a complete rough draft of a novel, and every rough draft, by being complete, is perfect.

I readily admit it is easy to make of horses what we will. Silent, in some ways reserved, they allow us to train them, and to project our ideas upon them; to ride and drive them, and to make them symbolic, perhaps to a greater degree than any other species.

If to live is to progress, if you are lucky, from foolishness to wisdom, then to write novels is to broadcast the various stages of your foolishness.

Oh, that sound? I'm in the hot tub, reading a novel.