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.

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.

Life is a means of extracting fiction.

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 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 try very hard to be fair, and I look for ironies. In a way, I live on ironies as a novelist.

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.