How much courage does it take to fire up your tractor and plow under a crop you spent six or seven years growing? How much courage to go on and do that after you've spent all that time finding out how to prepare the soil and when to plant and how much to water and when to reap? How much to just say, "I have to quit these peas. Peas are no good for me, I better try corn or beans.

He would write it for the reason he felt that all great literature, fiction and nonfiction, was written: truth comes out, in the end it always comes out. He would write it because he felt he had to.

Working with him was sort of like trying to defuse a bomb with somebody standing behind you and every now and then clashing a pair of cymbals together. In a word, upsetting.

There's a Mr. Hyde for every happy Jekyll face, a dark face on the other side of the mirror.

Of course when you were running with the bottom dogs, what you mostly saw were paws, claws, and assholes.

Resistance to change is proportional to how much the future might be altered by any given act.

How life did imitate art sometimes. And the cruder the art, the closer the imitation.