We are most alive when we're in love.

Professionalism in art has this difficulty: To be professional is to be dependable, to be dependable is to be predictable, and predictability is esthetically boring - an anti-virtue in a field where we hope to be astonished and startled and at some deep level refreshed.

You have a life and there are these volumes on either side that go unvisited; some day soon as the world winds he will lie beneath what he now stands on, dead as those insects whose sound he no longer hears, and the grass will go on growing, wild and blind.

In memory's telephoto lens, far objects are magnified.

Fiction is nothing less than the subtlest instrument for self-examination and self-display that Mankind has invented yet.

Money is like water in a leaky bucket: no sooner there, it begins to drip.

Each morning my characters greet me with misty faces willing, though chilled, to muster for another day's progress through the dazzling quicksand the marsh of blank paper.