To sum it all up, if you want to write, if you want to create, you must be the most sublime fool that God ever turned out and sent rambling. You must write every single day of your life. You must write dreadful dumb books and glorious books, and let them wrestle in beautiful fights inside your head, vulgar one moment, brilliant the next.

The novel's not organized like a screenplay. If you shot the novel, you'd have a twelve-hour movie.

Programs like 'Jeopardy' and 'Who Wants to Be a Millionaire' are ridiculous. They're the stupidest shows in history. They're making us dumber. They don't give us information, they give us facts, factoids. You don't learn who Napoleon was and how he was motivated. You learn what year he was born, and when he died. That's useless.

I sometimes get up at night when I can't sleep and walk down into my library and open one of my books and read a paragraph and say, 'My God, did I write that?

In order to be creative, you don't have to be original.

We should have stayed on the moon. We should have made moon the base, instead of building space stations, which are fragile and which fly apart.

Kerosene," he said, because the silence had lengthened, "is nothing but perfume to me.