Why would you clone people when you can go to bed with them and make a baby? C'mon, it's stupid.

To sum it all up, if you want to write, if you want to create, you must be the most sublime fool that God ever turned out and sent rambling. You must write every single day of your life. You must write dreadful dumb books and glorious books, and let them wrestle in beautiful fights inside your head, vulgar one moment, brilliant the next.

Kids love me because I write stories that tell them about their capacity for evil. I'm one of the few writers who lets you cleanse yourself that way.

But you can't make people listen. They have to come round in their own time, wondering what happened and why the world blew up around them. It can't last.

How working for the wrong motives poisons our creativity and warps our ideas of success and failure.

Plot is no more than footprints left in the snow after your characters have run by on their way to incredible destinations.

I went to bed and woke in the middle of the night thinking I heard someone cry, thinking I myself was weeping, and I felt my face and it was dry. Then I looked at the window and thought: Why, yes, it's just the rain, the rain, always the rain, and turned over, sadder still, and fumbled about for my dripping sleep and tried to slip it back on.