I've accrued a kind of patience, I believe, loosely like change.

You are unhappy because you believe in such a thing as happy.

A short story is a love affair, a novel is a marriage. A short story is a photograph; a novel is a film.

Pleasantness was the machismo of the Midwest. There was something athletic about it. You flexed your face into a smile and let it hover there like the dare of a cat.

Writers have no real area of expertise. They are merely generalists with a highly inflamed sense of punctuation.

Surrealism could not be made up. It was the very electricity of the real.

People will do anything, anything, for a really nice laugh.