Your heart becomes gangrenous in your body when you go against your talent.

All writers of fiction will at some point find themselves abandoning a piece of work - or find themselves putting it aside, as we gently say.

When success happens to an English writer, he acquires a new typewriter. When success happens to an American writer, he acquires a new life.

Envy never comes to the ball dressed as envy; it comes dressed as high moral standards or distaste for materialism.

Belief is otiose; reality is sufficiently awesome as it stands.

Because we are all poets or babies in the middle of the night, struggling with being.

I love the working class, and everyone from it that I've met, and think they're incredible witty, inventive - there's a lot of poetry there. A lot of rough stuff as well. What there is, too, is an awful lot of expressiveness and intelligence and originality down there. And a lot of thwarted intelligence.