I have been a writer since 1949. I am self-taught. I have no theories about writing that might help others. When I write, I simply become what I seemingly must become. I am six feet two and weigh nearly two hundred pounds and am badly coordinated, except when I swim. All that borrowed meat does the writing. In the water I am beautiful.

The smartest people in Indianapolis became teachers [during the Great Depression]. And, for once, there was something for women to do because teaching was regarded as a woman's profession, like nursing. So the smartest women in town - Jesus, my women teachers were so exciting.

We are all experiments in enthusiasms, narrow and preordained.

Take it from somebody who has been around for a million years: When you get right down to it, food is practically the whole story every time.

Who is more to be pitied, a writer bound and gagged by policemen or one living in perfect freedom who has nothing more to say?

You realize, of course, that everything I say is horseshit.

I wish that people who are conventionally supposed to love each other would say to each other, when they fight, "Please - a little less love, and a little more common decency."