That's my only defense against this world: to build a sentence out of it.

I'd rather get a brain tumor than go back to teaching.

I see more genuine sociability between the races in Mississippi than I see in Michigan. No question.

I wonder, when a writer's blocked and doesn't have any resources to pull himself out of it, why doesn't he jump in his car and drive around the U.S.A.? I went last winter for seven thousand miles and it was lovely. Inexpensive, too.

I asked a French critic a couple of years ago why my books did so well in France. He said it was because in my novels people both act and think. I got a kick out of that.

Poetry at its best is the language your soul would speak if you could teach your soul to speak.

Every day I wonder how many things I am dead wrong about. -- True North