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.

That's the great thing about literature -- it makes the world less lonely.

I really, really wanted to write. I loved language. I loved literature. I loved reading. I never read a foreign language, I'm afraid, but I loved Flaubert. I loved the 19th-century classics. I love Thomas Hardy. I wanted to be a goof on a bus, but I wanted to write more.

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

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.

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.

It's all about letting the story take over.