Plot is no more than footprints left in the snow after your characters have run by on their way to incredible destinations.

Any man who can take a TV wall apart and put it back together again, and most men can nowadays, is happier than any man who tries to slide-rule, measure, and equate the universe, which just won't be measured or equated without making man feel bestial and lonely.

Man has always been half-monster, half-dreamer.

Miraculously, smoke curled out of his own mouth, his nose, his ears, his eyes, as if his soul had been extinguished within his lungs at the very moment the sweet pumpkin gave up its incensed ghost.

The trouble with a lot of people who try to write is they intellectualize about it. That comes after. The intellect is given to us by God to test things once they’re done, not to worry about things ahead of time.

When I graduated from high school, it was during the Depression and we had no money.

Here at this far lost end of the continent, where the trail wagons had stopped and the people with them.