I ate them like salad, books were my sandwich for lunch, my tiffin and dinner and midnight munch. I tore out the pages, ate them with salt, doused them with relish, gnawed on the bindings, turned the chapters with my tongue! Books by the dozen, the score and the billion. I carried so many home I was hunchbacked for years. Philosophy, art history, politics, social science, the poem, the essay, the grandiose play, you name 'em, I ate 'em.

My tunes and numbers are here. They have filled my years, the years when I refused to die. And in order to do that I wrote, I wrote, I wrote, at noon or 3:00 A.M. So as not to be dead.

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

Science and religion have to go hand in hand with the mystery, because there's a certain point beyond which you say, "There are no answers."

Every story I've written was written because I had to write it. Writing stories is like breathing for me; it is my life.

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.

All of the good, weird stories I’ve written are based on things I’ve dredged out of my subconscious. That’s the real stuff. Everything else is fake.