I am, when you stop to think of it, a member of a fairly select group: the final handful of American novelists who learned to read and write before they learned to eat a daily helping of video bullshit.

and the rain went rollin down the windowpanes, and the shadows wiggled n' squiggled on her check and forehead like black veins.

Sooner or later everything you thought you'd left behind comes around again. For good or ill, it comes around again.

Only children tell the whole truth, you know. That's what makes them children.

Whenever anything important happens in America, they have to gold-plate it, like baby shoes. That way you can forget it.

There are lots of guys out there who write a better prose line than I do and who have a better understanding of what people are really like and what humanity is supposed to mean - hell, I know that.

In both writing and sleeping, we learn to be physically still at the same time we are encouraging our minds to unlock from the humdrum rational thinking of our daytime lives.