I want to hold onto this funny thing. God, it's gotten big on me. I don't know what it is. I'm so damned unhappy, I'm so mad, and I don't know why. I feel like I'm putting on weight. I feel fat. I feel like I'm saving a lot of things, and I don't know what. I might even start reading books.

A reason I became a writer was to escape the hopelessness and despair of the real world and enter the world of hope I could create with my imagination.

I don't think about what I do. I do it. That's Buddhism. I jump off the cliff and build my wings on the way down.

Bees do have a smell, you know, and if they don't they should, for their feet are dusted with spices from a million flowers.

Time was a film run backward. Suns fled and ten million moons fled after them.

And I saw then and there you take a man half-bad and a women half-bad and put their two good halves together and you got one human all good to share between.

This afternoon, burn down the house. Tomorrow, pour critical water upon the simmering coals. Time enough to think and cut and rewrite tomorrow. But today-explode-f ly-apart-disint egrate! The other six or seven drafts are going to be pure torture. So why not enjoy the first draft, in the hope that your joy will seek and find others in the world who, by reading your story, will catch fire, too?