It was a thunderingly beautiful experience-voluptuous, sexual, dangerous, and expensive as hell.

Make love when you can. It's good for you.

Thank God for novelists. Thank God there are people willing to write everything down. Otherwise, so much would be forgotten.

I taught writing for a while and whenever somebody would tell me they were going to write about their dad, I would tell them they might as well go write about killing puppies because neither story was going to work. It just doesn't work.

This is what i find most encouraging about the writing trades: they allow mediocre people who are patient and industrious to revise their stupidity, to edit themselves into something like intelligence. They also allow lunatics to seem saner than sane.

When I write, I feel like an armless, legless man with a crayon in his mouth.

Americans, like human beings everywhere, believe many things that are obviously untrue, the monograph went on. Their most destructive untruth is that it is very easy for any American to make money. They will not acknowledge how in fact how hard money is to come by, and, therefore, those who have no money blame and blame and blame themselves.