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 write a very rough first draft of every chapter, then I rewrite every chapter. I try to get it down in the first rewrite, but some chapters I can't get quite right the third time. There are some I go over and over and over again.

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

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

It's easy to create a country, all you have to do is to think of a name for it

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.

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