You can’t learn to write in college. It’s a very bad place for writers because the teachers always think they know more than you do—and they don’t. They have prejudices. They may like Henry James, but what if you don’t want to write like Henry James? They may like John Irving, for instance, who’s the bore of all time. A lot of the people whose work they’ve taught in the schools for the last thirty years, I can’t understand why people read them and why they are taught.

Kerosene," he said, because the silence had lengthened, "is nothing but perfume to me.

The great thing about my life is that everything I've done is a result of what I was when I was 12 or 13.

We can't live alone in any society. But the best way to help a society or group, is to be the best individual in it that we can be.

Too late, I found you can't wait to become perfect, you got to go out and fall down and get up with everybody else.

All of the good, weird stories I’ve written are based on things I’ve dredged out of my subconscious. That’s the real stuff. Everything else is fake.

Who has more pockets than a magician? A boy. Whose pockets contain *more* than a magicians? A boy's.