...if you are writing without zest, without gusto, without love, without fun, you are only half a writer. It means you are so busy keeping one eye on the commercial market, or one ear peeled for the avant-garde coterie, that you are not being yourself. You don't even know yourself. For the first thing a writer should be is-- excited. He should be a thing of fevers and enthusiasms.

Ours is a culture and a time immensely rich in trash as it is in treasures.

First, find out what your hero wants, then just follow him.

I have fun with ideas; I play with them.

When I was a young man, I didn't think about having a family. My wife and I were too poor to have babies. Then all of a sudden, one came along and scared the hell out of us because we had no money. Once the baby arrives, you make do somehow. You fall in love with the baby and life adjusts itself. You find you don't need as much money as you thought. When that happens, you can ask the questions that should have come before the baby.

You must never name the goal. You must never tell us the target you're hitting for. You must automatically go toward it without ever naming it.

Way out in the country tonight he could smell the pumpkins ripening toward the knife and the triangle eye and the singeing candle.