The smartest people in Indianapolis became teachers [during the Great Depression]. And, for once, there was something for women to do because teaching was regarded as a woman's profession, like nursing. So the smartest women in town - Jesus, my women teachers were so exciting.

What everybody is well advised to do is to not write about your own life, this is if you want to write fast. You will be writing about your own life anyway but you won't know it.

You say what you have to say. But you have to learn to say it in such a way that the reader can see what you mean.

Science never cheered up anyone. The truth about the human situation is just too awful.

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.

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 are here for no purpose, unless we can invent one.