I've been to a lot of places and done a lot of things, but writing was always first. It's a kind of pain I can't do without.

To be an American is not...a matter of blood; it is a matter of an idea--and history is the image of that idea.

There was nothing particularly wrong with them; they were just the ordinary garden variety of human garbage.

But for the present I would lie there and know I didn't have to get up, and feel the holy emptiness and blessed fatigue of a saint after the dark night of the soul. For God and Nothing have a lot in common. You look either one of Them straight in the eye for a second and the immediate effect on the human constitution is the same.

How life is strange and changeful, and the crystal is in the steel at the point of fracture, and the toad bears a jewel in its forehead, and the meaning of moments passes like the breeze that scarcely ruffles the leaf of the willow.

Real writers are those who want to write, need to write, have to write.

The image that fiction presents is purged of the distractions, confusions and accidents of ordinary life.