A little autobiography and a lot of imagination are best.

All of us, all of us, all of us trying to save our immortal souls, some ways seemingly more round about and mysterious than others. We are having a good time here. But hope all will be revealed soon.

Anyone can express himself or herself, but what writers and poets want to do in their work, more than simply express themselves, is communicate.

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

The fiction Im most interested in has lines of reference to the real world.

If we're lucky, writer and reader alike, we'll finish the last line or two of a short story and then just sit for a minute, quietly. Ideally, we'll ponder what we've just written or read; maybe our hearts or intellects will have been moved off the peg just a little from where they were before. Our body temperature will have gone up, or down, by a degree. Then, breathing evenly and steadily once more, we'll collect ourselves, writers and readers alike, get up, "created of warm blood and nerves" as a Chekhov character puts it, and go on to the next thing: Life. Always life.

That's all we have, finally, the words, and they had better be the right ones.