I am always chilled and astonished by the would-be writers who ask me for advice and admit, quite blithely, that they "don't have time to read." This is like a guy starting up Mount Everest saying that he didn't have time to buy any rope or pitons.

In spite of the problems he was having he was going on with his life. There are thousands who don’t or won’t or can’t and plenty of them aren’t in prison either.

Poe was the first writer to write about main characters who were bad guys or who were mad guys, and those are some of my favorite stories.

" Science is beginning to encroach on every level of our volition". And to me, that is a frightening social concept. It doesn't have anything to do with the right to have an abortion verses the right to life. It has to do with the ability of science to keep things alive and the ability of science to really control our lives.

Although emotionally delicate and eminently bruisable, teenagers are short on empathy. That comes later in life, if it comes at all.

I didn't go to bars much. One drunken asshole was all I could handle and that was me. I wrote. I don't remember a lot of it.

Reading is the creative center of a writer's life." -