In many ways, Eulah-Beulah prepared me for literary criticism. After having a two-hundred-pound babysitter fart on your face and yell Pow!, The Village Voice holds few terrors.

The book is not the important part. The book is the delivery system. The important part is the story and the talent.

When you sit down to write, write. Don't do anything else except go to the bathroom, and only do that if it absolutely cannot be put off.

People who try hard to do the right thing always seem mad.

When I knew I was going to be able to write full time, I wondered, "What's going to happen to the relationships within my family?" Are they going to change? Is it going to be the kind of deal where you say, "I can't take this! Get me out of here! I can't stand these screaming kids!" The way it turned out was, I was able to change the diapers okay, after I stuck the pin through my fingers a few times. I had a dawning realization that children are not particularly hard to deal with.

My wife has told me since that I was hungover every mornng until about two in the afternoon, and from five until midnight I was drunk out of my mind. So she says there was this period of about three hours when she could talk to me like a rational human being.

I did spend years as an addict, so I know that world, although I wish I didn't.