In America they have to know just what you are-- novelist, poet, playwright... Well, I've been all of them... I think poems and novels and stories spring from the same seed. It's not like, say, playing polo and knitting.

History is not melodrama, even if it usually reads like that.

All I've tried to do (with my writing) is capture the essence of my time.

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

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

...the air so still it aches like the place where the tooth was on the morning after you’ve been to the dentist or aches like your heart in the bosom when you stand on the street corner waiting for the light to change and happen to recollect how things once were and how they might have been yet if what happened had not happened.

You have to make the good out of the bad because that is all you have got to make it out of.