Out in the world not much happened. But here in the special night, a land bricked with paper and leather anything might happen, always did.

How do you get so empty? Who takes it out of you?

You grow ravenous. You run fevers. You know exhilarations. You can't sleep at night, because your beast-creature ideas want out and turn you in your bed. It is a grand way to live.

If you stuff yourself full of poems, essays, plays, stories, novels, films, comic strips, magazines, music, you automatically explode every morning like Old Faithful. I have never had a dry spell in my life, mainly because I feed myself well, to the point of bursting. I wake early and hear my morning voices leaping around in my head like jumping beans. I get out of bed to trap them before they escape.

Reading is at the center of our lives. The library is our brain. Without the library, you have no civilization.

You're either in love with what you do, or you're not in love.

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