When you're the ones in the life raft and you have four or five women in the life raft who put it together, by the end of it your nerves are blown. The people you're going to attack are the people who are helping you, who you are holding it together with.

If you want to make a human being into a monster, deny them, at the cultural level any reflection of themselves

What we [writers] do might be done in solitude and with great desperation, but it tends to produce exactly the opposite. It tends to produce community and in many people hope and joy.

The art is just really mysterious. If I understood it more, maybe I would write more.

As expected: she, the daughter of the Fall, recipient of its heaviest radiation, loved atomically.

When she smiles niggers ask her for her hand in marriage; when I smile folks check their wallets.

Instead of lowering your head and copping to it like a man, you pick up the journal as one might hold a bady's beshattered diaper, as one might pinch a recently benutted condom. You glance at the offending passages. Then you look at her and smile a smile your dissembling face will remember until the day you die. Baby, you say, baby, this is part of my novel. This is how you lose her.