I'll hold on to the world tight some day. I've got one finger on it now; that's a beginning.

He lay far across the room from her, on a winter island separated by an empty sea. She talked to him for what seemed a long while and she talked about this and she talked about that and it was only words, like the words he had heard once in a nursery at a friend's house, a two-year-old child building word patters, like jargon, making pretty sounds in the air.

It's rare you get an idea from a dream. I can't really recall a story that ever worked out that way. I think in 35 years of writing, that I've ever had a dream that held up. They're much too dislocated

I'm not in control of my muse. My muse does all the work.

Every time you take a step, even when you don't want to. . . . When it hurts, when it means you rub chins with death, or even if it means dying, that's good. Anything that moves ahead, wins. No chess game was ever won by the player who sat for a lifetime thinking over his next move.

The books are to remind us what asses and fools we are.

You don't pay any attention to anything anyone else says, no opinions. The important thing is to explode with a story, to emotionalize a story, not to think it. You start thinking - the story's going to die on its feet.