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.

The kids accepted my drinking as a part of life. Not a particularly pernicious part. I didn't beat up on them. Basically I don't think I was so different from a lot of dads who have three or four martinis when they get in from work, wine with dinner and so on.

And poets, in my view, and I think the view of most people, do speak God's language - it's better, it's finer, it's language on a higher plane than ordinary people speak in their daily lives.

But it's hard for a man to give up all his pleasures, even when they don't pleasure him no more.

Fear is the emotion that makes us blind.

One of the really bad things you can do to your writing is to dress up the vocabulary, looking for long words because you're maybe a little bit ashamed of your short ones. This is like dressing up a household pet in evening clothes. The pet is embarrassed and the person who committed this act of premeditated cuteness should be even more embarrassed.

The battle between good and evil is endlessly fascinating because we are participants every day.