The reason I was able to give up smoking was because of the computer. You couldn't lean a cigarette on a computer, like you could on a typewriter. So it just made it that much more difficult to smoke. So I quit.

I start early in the morning. I'm usually out in the woods with the dog as soon as it gets light; then I drink a whole lot of tea and start as early as I can, and I go as long as I can.

The lessons I learned that were most important were the ones that hurt my feelings.

I was under the influence of the early modern masters, Fitzgerald and Steinbeck and Hemingway, especially, when I was a kid. I reacted against writers like Barth and John Hawkes. I did not care for the post-modernist stuff; my allegiance was to realism.

You don't want to depend on an editor. If you want to regret something for the rest of your life, you want to make sure you're responsible for it.

I've always remembered. This fellow said to me - if you think someones'doing you wrong, it's not for you to judge. Kill them first and then God can do the judging.

The process of creating is related to the process of dreaming although when you are writing you're doing it and when you're dreaming, it's doing you.