Some prisons don't allow guitar because the strings can be detached and used as weapons.

I'd rather have cancer than a dishonest heart. Which isn't being pious. Just practical. Cancer may cool you, but the other's sure to.

Most contemporary novelists, especially the American and the French, are too subjective, mesmerized by private demons; theyre enraptured by their navels and confined by a view that ends with their own toes.

I've got something inside of me, peasantlike and stubborn, and I'm in it till the end of the race.

Don't wanna sleep, don't wanna die, just wanna go a-travellin' through the pastures of the sky

If you can't be friends with a lover, then forget it. It's not going to work.

Since each story presents its own technical problems, obviously one can't generalize about them on a two-times-two-equals-four basis. Finding the right form for your story is simply to realize the most natural way of telling the story. The test of whether or not a writer has defined the natural shape of his story is just this: After reading it, can you imagine it differently, or does it silence your imagination and seem to you absolute and final? As an orange is final. As an orange is something nature has made just right.