Having children is something we think we ought to do because our parents did it, but when it is over the children are just other members of the human race, rather disappointingly.

But for a few phrases from his letters and an odd line or two of his verse, the poet walks gagged through his own biography.

Try to develop actual work habits, and even though you have a busy life, try to reserve an hour, say - or more - a day to write. Some very good things have been written on an hour a day.

Writing criticism is to writing fiction and poetry as hugging the shore is to sailing in the open sea.

I like old men. They can be wonderful bastards because they have nothing to lose. The only people who can be themselves are babies and old bastards.

Government is either organized benevolence or organized madness; its peculiar magnitude permits no shading.

Most writers begin with accounts of their first home, their family, and the town, often from quite a hostile point of view-love/hate, let's say. In a way, this stepping outside, in an attempt to judge enough to create a duplicate of it, makes you an outsider. . . . I think it's healthy for a writer to feel like an outsider. If you feel like an insider you get committed to a partisan view, you begin to defend interests, so you wind up not really empathizing with all mankind.