It's hard enough for a person to keep their own socks pulled up, let alone someone else's.

Whenever I publish a book, I feel like a trapper caught by the Iroquois. They're all lined up with Tomahawks, and the idea is to run through with your head down, and everybody gets to take a swing. They hit you in the head, the back, the ass, and the balls.

Do you know how cruel your God can be, David. How fantastically cruel?...Sometimes he makes us live.

Good luck is just bad luck with its hair combed.

As a young man just beginning to publish some short fiction in the t&a magazines, I was fairly optimistic about my chances of getting published; I knew that I had some game, as the basketball players say these days, and I also felt that time was on my side; sooner or later the best-selling writers of the sixties and seventies would either die or go senile, making room for newcomers like me.

If you can't laugh when things go bad--laugh and put on a little carnival--then you're either dead or wishing you were.

I changed it. I had to. Do you know why?" She studied him, her eyes grave. "Because that was then and this is now. Because the past is gone, even though it defines the present.