I try very hard to be fair, and I look for ironies. In a way, I live on ironies as a novelist.

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 was a radioman when I first went into the Navy, so I learned to type by taking Morse code. So I was using the typewriter from day one. My handwriting wasn't any good anyway.

The things that you know more about than you want to know are very useful.

The desires of the heart...are as crooked as a corkscrew.

There’s only one subject for fiction or poetry or even a joke: how it is. In all the arts, the payoff is always the same: recognition. If it works, you say that’s real, that’s truth, that’s life, that’s the way things are. ‘There it is.’

What you're trying to do when you write is to crowd the reader out of his own space and occupy it with yours, in a good cause. You're trying to take over his sensibility and deliver an experience that moves from mere information.