She can't help it,' he said. 'She's got the soul of a poet and the emotional makeup of a junkyard dog.

Life was such a wheel that no man could stand upon it for long. And it always, at the end, came round to the same place again.

If there's one American belief I hold above all others, it's that those who would set themselves up in judgment on matters of what is "right" and what is "best" should be given no rest; that they should have to defend their behavior most stringently. ... As a nation, we've been through too many fights to preserve our rights of free thought to let them go just because some prude with a highlighter doesn't approve of them

A successful novel should interrupt the reader’s life, make him or her miss appointments, skip meals, forget to walk the dog.

When I gave up dope and alcohol, my immediate feeling was 'I've saved my life, but there'll be a price because I'll have nothing that buzzes me any more'. But I enjoyed my kids. My wife loved me and I loved her. And eventually the writing came back and I discovered that the writing was enough. Stupid thing is that probably it always had been.

If something is accessible to a lot of people, it's got to be dumb because most people are dumb.

But writers INVITE ghosts, maybe; along with actors and artists, they are the only totally accepted mediums of our society. They make worlds that never were, populate them with people who never existed, and then invite us to join them in their fantasies. And we do it, don't we? Yes. We PAY to do it.