Booze and tobacco and lots of sex. It keeps a lad young.

I’ve tried writing and the sentences come out fine, but I write a few pages and I don’t want to go on.

Something I learned long ago. It is not necessary to know what a person is afraid of. It is enough to know the person is afraid.

It's the easiest thing in the world to know God's will. You just wait and see what happens, and that's it.

One thing that helps is to give myself permission to write badly. I tell myself that I'm going to do my five or 10 pages no matter what, and that I can always tear them up the following morning if I want. I'll have lost nothing-writing and tearing up five pages would leave me no further behind than if I took the day off.

Stories are like assholes. Everybody's got one and most of 'em stink.

As my late mother famously observed, the one thing to be said for growing old is that every year there are a few more things I don’t have to give a rat’s ass about.