When a novel comes, it's a grace. Something in the cosmos has forgiven you long enough so that you can start.

The great power in America is the corporations - we`re a corporate country. We`re run by a CEO and the stockholders have very little to say on how the corporation is run. Fine, the board of directors run it and the stockholders can just be disgruntled, but who gives a damn?

Psychoanalysis and Zen, in my private psychic geometry, are equal to nicotine. They are anti-existential. Nicotine quarantines one out of existence.

Writing can wreck your body. You sit there on the chair hour after hour and sweat your guts out to get a few words.

When I read it ["Tough Guys Don't Dance"], I don't wince, which is all I ever ask for a book I write.

Somerset Maugham ... wrote somewhere that "Nobody is any better than he ought to be."... I carried it along with me as a working philosophy, but I suppose that finally I would have to take exception to the thought ... or else the universe is just an elaborate clock.

The sole virtue of losing your short-term memory is that it does free you to be your own editor.