People should practice an art in order to make their souls grow and not to make money or become famous. Paint a picture. Write.

I'm eighty-three and I've been smoking since I was eleven. I'm suing the cigarette company because it promised to kill me and it hasn't.

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.

I am an atheist (or at best a Unitarian who winds up in church quite a lot).

Literature should not disappear up its own asshole, so to speak.

Perhaps I am the turtle, able to live simply anywhere, even underwater for short periods, with my home on my back.

If it weren't for the message of mercy and pity in Jesus' Sermon on the Mount, I wouldn't want to be a human being. I would just as soon be a rattlesnake.