I try to write into the heart of experience. Then, through the experience of the writing, that heart reveals itself to me. To write it down for others, as a door to go through it they choose, is the price of the experience, the price of the ticket. This is the demand that God, if you like, puts on you for being an artist.

To be physically astute and psychologically tended, yet morally insulated and conceptually blind--is to be crazy, not healthy.

Creativity is the vulnerability to spiritual and physical sensation, and to experience, combined with and acting upon a certain level of skill, combined with the compulsion or longing or need or desire to give.

Stop tolerating in your leaders what you would not tolerate in your friends.

There are writers I know and respect who are very good about what's outside, and not too hot about what's inside.

It may be that it is not given to us to know when we are angels. We may only be given to know when others are. This may be one of the reasons we need each other so.

If I had the money and the drinking capacity, I'd probably live at a roulette table and let my life go to hell.