If you are a novelist of a certain type of termperament, then what you really want to do is re-invent the world. God wasn't too bad a novelist except he was a Realist.

Printed prose is historically a most peculiar, almost an aberrant way of telling stories, and by far the most inherently anesthetic: It is the only medium of art I can think of which appeals directly to none of our five senses. The oral and folk tradition in narrative made use of verse or live-voice dynamics, embellished by gesture and expression--a kind of rudimentary theater--as do the best raconteurs of all times. Commonly there was musical accompaniment as well: a kind of one-man theater-of-mixed-means.

It's easier and sociabler to talk technique than it is to make art.

Those rituals of getting ready to write produce a kind of trance state.

He wishes he had never entered the funhouse. But he has. Then he wishes he were dead. But he's not. Therefore he will construct funhouses for others and be their secret operator -- though he would rather be among the lovers for whom funhouses are designed.

Tis e'er the lot of the innocent in the world, to fly to the wolf for succor from the lion.

Tis e'er the wont of simple folk to prize the deed and o'erlook the motive, and of learned folk to discount the deed and lay open the soul of the doer.