It's only recently that I've come to understand that writers are not marginal to our society, that they, in fact, do all our thinking for us, that we are writing myths and our myths are believed, and that old myths are believed until someone writes a new one.

We were German-Americans in a British colony, so we were outsiders.

We are America's Great Lakes people, her freshwater people, not an oceanic but a continental people. Whenever I swim in an ocean, I feel as though I am swimming in chicken soup.

No one can amount to a damn in the arts if he becomes sweetly reasonable, seeing all sides of a picture, forgiving all sins.

The reason we write fiction is because it's so much easier to exist spending part of each day in an imaginary world.

Before you kill somebody, make absolutely sure he isn't well connected. So it goes.

In the water I am beautiful.