You have to be very deep to be dead, he thought, and I'm not. He began to have some concept of forever, and his mind shivered as his body had when he had wakened in the cold nights and thrust his hands between his thighs to keep warm. It will be a long night, he thought.

But I still feel I waste a lot of time leaning on my elbow and thinking to myself, 'alright sucker, now what?'

A Clock is not time; it's numbers and springs. Pay it no mind.

You ever want to see real witchcraft, you watch people protecting their comfort, their beliefs.

I feel a whole country growing inside me, thousands of years, millions of people, stupid, crazy, shrewd people, and all of them me. I never felt like that before, I never felt that there was anything inside me, even myself.

They know these mornings well and love them desperately because they cannot last - these people who know that nothing lasts.

Writing has nothing to do with publishing. Nothing. People get totally confused about that. You write because you have to - you write because you can't not write. The rest is show-business. I can't state that too strongly. Just write - worry about the rest of it later, if you worry at all. What matters is what happens to you while you're writing the story, the poem, the play. The rest is show-business.