It is better to be small, colorful, sexy, careless, and peaceful.

I am looking for the novelists whose writing is an extension of their intellect rather than an extension of their neurosis.

Not naive,' Conch shell had corrected him. 'He simply has not been taught to fear the things you fear.

There are essential and inessential insanities. The later are solar in character, the former are linked to the moon.

Actually, there are countless ways to live upon this tremorous sphere in mirth and good health, and probably only one way - the industrial, urbanized, herding way - to live here stupidly, and man has hit upon that one way.

Should one be shallow enough to view existence as a system of rewards and punishments, one soon learns that we pay as dearly for our triumphs as we do for our defeats.

John Irving once told me he doesn't start a novel until he knows the last sentence. I said, 'My God, Irving, isn't that like working in a factory?'