This world… belongs to the strong, my friend! The ritual of our existence is based on the strong getting stronger by devouring the weak.

If you don't watch it people will force you one way or the other, into doing what they think you should do, or into just being mule-stubborn and doing the opposite out of spite.

I felt like you can write forever, but you have a short time to raise a family. And I think a family is a lot more important than writing.

You can't really be strong until you see a funny side to things.

But the more I read... after awhile... I begin to find they were all writing about the same thing, this same dull old here-today-gone-tomorrow scene... Shakespeare, Milton, Matthew Arnold, even Baudelaire, even this cat whoever he was that wrote Beowulf... the same scene for the same reasons and to the same end, whether it was Dante with his pit or Baudelaire with his pot... the same dull old scene...

Me and Norman Mailer have talked about how hard it is in America to get better. Especially at writing.

The frontiers we broke into in the '60s are still largely unexplored.