any compulsion tries to justify itself.

Once I get over maybe a hundred pages, I won't go back to page one, but I might go back to page fifty-five, or twenty, even. But then every once in a while I feel the need to go to page one again and start rewriting.

Some of us who live in arid parts of the world think about water with a reverence others might find excessive.

Anything worth having has its price.

Details are our business as writers. Your heart leaps when you see a detail that can go somewhere

It is easy to see the beginnings of things, and harder to see the ends.

A young woman with long hair and a short white halter dress walks through the casino at the Riviera in Las Vegas at one in the morning. It was precisely this moment that made Play It As It Lays begin to tell itself to me.