An athlete may run ten thousand miles in order to prepare for one hundred yards. Quantity gives experience.

Don't they get afraid, then?" "They have a religion for that.

Notoriety and a fat bank balance must come after everything else is finished and done.

Don't think. Thinking is the enemy of creativity. It's self-conscious, and anything self-conscious is lousy. You can't try to do things. You simply must do things.

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.

You must live feverishly in a library. Colleges are not going to do any good unless you are raised and live in a library everyday of your life.

I have four daughters and eight grandchildren. My soul lives on in them. That's immortality. That's the only immortality I care about.