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

One does not consider style, because style is.

If you haven't fought for your life for something you want, you don't know what's life all about.

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

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.

The process of creating is related to the process of dreaming although when you are writing you're doing it and when you're dreaming, it's doing you.

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.