Thinking of Poe, thinking of Mark Twain and Vachel Lindsay, thinking of Jack London and Tom Wolfe, one begins to feel there is almost no way of becoming a creative writer in America without being a loser.

...he said, with sort of a little derisive smile, "How can you walk down the street with all this stuff going on inside you?" I said, "I don't know how you can walk down the street with nothing going on inside you.

And never, ever, no matter what else you do in your whole life, never sleep with anyone whose troubles are worse than your own.

For the masses who do the city's labor also keep the city's heart.

I'm not against sentimentality. I think you need it. I mean, I don't think you get a true picture of people without it in writing... It's a kind of poetry, it's an emotional poetry, and, to bring it back to the literary scene, I don't think anything is true that doesn't have it, that doesn't have poetry in it.

Literature is made upon any occasion that a challenge is put to the legal apparatus by conscience in touch with humanity.

The only way I could finish a book and get a plot was just to keep making it longer until something happens.