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 think there's a necessity for some attachment to the spiritual world and, in a way, people really have to have it.

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.’

At the time, acid made me consider questions of reality, the difference, as someone said, between words and silence. It also brought back a lot of latent religious feelings in me that I had turned my back on.

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

Everybody's after a new morning. What do we have to run up and salute tomorrow?

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.