We were into the Speedway. We'd take a train out to the Speedway where farmers had flatbed trucks with bleachers on them. They'd park in the infield and we'd sit on those. Our heroes weren't the drivers, they were the pit crews. That's because we were local, and we knew what was going on.

There is no beginning, no middle, no end, no suspense, no moral, no causes, no effects. What we love in our books are the depths of many marvelous moments seen all at one time.

I was some of the mud that got to sit up and look around. Lucky me, lucky mud.

Their imaginations were flywheels on the ramshackle machinery of the awful truth.

Beer, of course, is actually a depressant, but poor people will never stop hoping otherwise.

Her face ... was a one-of-a-kind, a surprising variation on a familiar theme - a variation that made observers think, Yes - that would be another very nice way for people to look. What Beatrice had done with her face, actually, was what any plain girl could do. She overlaid it with dignity, suffering, intelligence, and a piquant dash of bitchiness.

I am simply impressed by the unexpected insights which shower down on me when my job is to imagine, as contrasted with the woodenly familiar ideas which clutter my desk when my job is to tell the truth.