The more you read, the less apt you are to make a fool of yourself with your pen or word processor.

It's a hard life if you don't weaken.

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.

I was sitting one day and thinking about cannibalism, because that's what guys like me do... and I thought, suppose a guy was washed up on a rocky island, how much of himself could he eat?

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.

I realized the shells were talking in a voice I recognized. I should have; it was my own. Had I always known that? I suppose I had. On some level, unless we're mad, I think most of us know the various voices of our own imaginations. And of our memories, of course. They have voices, too. Ask anyone who has ever lost a limb or a child or a long-cherished dream. Ask anyone who blames himself for a bad decision, usually made in a raw instant (an instant that is most commonly red). Our memories have voices, too. Often sad ones that clamor like raised arms in the dark.

My books depend on someone in danger, putting pieces together and figuring things out. They do a lot of thinking, and that gets lost in the movie.