If you couldn't tell the difference between what hurt and what didn't, you had no business being alive. You can't have any good times if you can't tell.

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.

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

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

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 think everybody must be aware that this society is a whole lot shakier now than it was before the war. I was trying to examine, in 'Dog Soldiers,' the process of that blow falling on America

Life is a means of extracting fiction.