When you get born your father and mother lost something out of themselves, and they are going to bust a ham trying to get it back, and you are it. They know they can't get it all back but they will get as big a chunk out of you as they can.

In one deep sense, novels are concealed autobiography. I don't mean that you are telling facts about yourself, but you are trying to find out what you really think or who you are.

[A]nd soon now we shall go out of the house and go into the convulsion of the world, out of history into history and the awful responsibility of Time.

I don't expect you'll hear me writing any poems to the greater glory of Ronald and Nancy Reagan.

If you are an idealist, it does not matter what you do or what goes on around you because it isn't real anyway.

When you get born your father and mother lost something out of themselves, and they are going to bust a ham trying to get it back, and you are it. They know they can't get it all back but they will get as big a chunk out of you as they can.

Your business as a writer is not to illustrate virtue but to show how a fellow may move toward it or away from it.