We are what we pretend to be.

You meet saints everywhere. They can be anywhere. They are people behaving decently in an indecent society.

Also, I think that, you know, it's tribal behavior. I don't think that Pat Robertson, for instance, doubts that we evolved. He is simply representing a tribe.

Sometimes I wonder if he wasn't born dead. I never met a man who was less interested in the living. Sometimes I think that's the trouble with the world: too many people in high places who are stone-cold dead.

I think it can be tremendously refreshing if a creator of literature has something on his mind other than the history of literature so far. Literature should not disappear up its own asshole, so to speak.

American Rifleman and Field & Stream had ads for "varmint guns." Another varmint was a ground hog because a horse would be going along and he'd stick his foot in a ground hog hole and break his leg. So we were trying to prevent that, too. But we finally scared ourselves. We didn't realize we were nuts.

There was a still life on Billy's bedside table-two pills, an ashtray with three lipstick-stained cigarettes in it, one cigarette still burning, and a glass of water. The water was dead. So it goes. Air was trying to get out of the dead water. Bubbles were clinging to the walls of the glass, too weak to climb out.