Writing has laws of perspective, of light and shade just as painting does, or music. If you are born knowing them, fine. If not, learn them. Then rearrange the rules to suit yourself.

Talent, and genius as well, is like a grain of pearl sand shifting about in the creative mind. A valued tormentor.

Good writing is rewriting.

The wind is us-- it gathers and remembers all our voices, then sends them talking and telling through the leaves and the fields.

I feel that all a writer has is his own experience.

Mick Jagger is about as sexy as a pissing toad.

There was an American girl, Priscilla Johnson. She worked for U.P. in Moscow. She knew [John] Kennedy, and she met [Lee Harvey] Oswald around the same time I did. But I can tell you some­thing else almost as curious.