I still believe in the resilience of the human heart and the essential validity of love;I still believe that connections between people can be made and that the spirits which inhabit us sometimes touch. I still believe that the cost of these connections is horribly, outrageously high... and I still believe that the value received far outweighs the price which must be paid. (From introductory notes.)

Who gets to be best-liked in any community? Who is the most trusted? Why, the man who does the dirty job, of course, and does it with a smile. The man who does the job you couldn't bring yourself to do.

These self-appointed deacons in the Church of Latter-Day American Literature seem to regard generosity (of words) with suspicion, texture with dislike, and any broad literary stroke with outright hate. The result is a strange and arid literary climate where a meaningless little fingernail paring like Nicholson Baker's Vox becomes an object of fascinated debate and dissection, and a truly ambitious American novel like Matthew's Heart of the Country is all but ignored.

Death is when the monsters get you.

Put an egg in your shoe and beat it, make like a tree and leave, imitate an amoeba and split.

How to Draw a Picture (XII) Know when you're finished, and when you are, put your pencil or your paintbrush down. All the rest is only life.

I’ve always said to people, "I don’t care what you call me as long as the checks don’t bounce and the family gets fed." But I never saw myself that way. I just saw myself as a novelist.