Booze takes a lot of time and effort if you're going to do a good job with it.

The smooth stones you pick up and examine under the moon's light have been made blue from the sea. Next morning when you pull them from your trouser pocket, they are still blue.

Every great or even every very good writer makes the world over according to his own specifications.

A little autobiography and a lot of imagination are best.

That morning she pours Teacher's over my belly and licks it off. That afternoon she tries to jump out the window.

It's possible, in a poem or short story, to write about commonplace things and objects using commonplace but precise language, and to endow those things—a chair, a window curtain, a fork, a stone, a woman's earring—with immense, even startling power.

He wondered if she wondered if he were watching her.