...my basic belief about the making of stories is that they pretty much make themselves.

...knowing that to be a librarian was to come as close as any human being can to sitting in the peak-seat of eternity's engine.

Friends come in and out of our lives, like busboys in a restaurant.

There had never been a shortage of fools in the world

The sort of strenuous reading and writing program I advocate - four to six hours a day, every day - will not seem strenuous if you really enjoy doing these things and have an aptitude for them.

In many ways, Eulah-Beulah prepared me for literary criticism. After having a two-hundred-pound babysitter fart on your face and yell Pow!, The Village Voice holds few terrors.

He was a clot looking for a place to happen, a splinter of bone hunting a soft organ to puncture, a lonely lunatic cell looking for a mate - they would set up housekeeping and raise themselves a cozy little malignant tumor.