And I knew that it was better to live out one's absurdity than to die for that of others.

My hole is warm and full of light.

The blues is an impulse to keep the painful details and episodes of a brutal experience alive in one's aching consciousness, to finger its jagged grain, and to transcend it, not by the consolation of philosophy but by squeezing from it a near-tragic, near-comic lyricism. As a form, the blues is an autobiographical chronicle of personal catastrophe expressed lyrically.

Every serious novel is, beyond its immediate thematic preoccupations, a discussion of the craft, a conquest of the form, a conflict with its difficulties and a pursuit of its felicities and beauty.

Good fiction is made of that which is real, and reality is difficult to come by.

Without the possibility of action, all knowledge comes to one labeled 'file and forget.'

All novels are about certain minorities: the individual is a minority.