You have to really have a taste for being alone to be a writer.

It's beyond the grasp of anyone's memory to recall conversations in kind of [memoir] detail. So it's fake. It's all made up.

All I wanted to do was write - at the time, poems, and prose, too. I guess my ambition was simply to make money however I could to keep myself going in some modest way, and I didn't need much, I was unmarried at the time, no children.

What better portrait of a writer than to show a man who has been bewitched by books?

I think I hate cynicism more than anything else. It's the curse of our age, and I want to avoid it at all costs.

Stories only happen to those who are able to tell them.

Existence was bigger than just life. It was everyone's life all together, and even if you lived in Buffalo, New York and had never been more than ten miles from home, you were part of the puzzle, too. It didn't matter how small your life was.